C-x anything is too close to C-z, though that is more of an annoyance than harm.

Quitting emacs should be a fairly rare task; just remap C-x C-c to something harder to hit by accident in your .emacs file.

(I would do this myself, but I keep putting it off.)

Oh, I do. Same with C-z as mentioned below. When I'm in a terminal-based session, I keep C-x C-c and C-z around. When I'm in my main X-based session, C-z is zap-to-char and C-x C-c is bury-buffer.

Stop using qwerty.

But then C-q C-j is too close to C-q C-x.

There are sane keyboard layouts besides Dvorak.

Just to name two: I heard Colemak is nice, and I also tried learning Neo for a while. (Neo is especially suited for German.) I am using Dvorak at the moment.