An interesting problem here is the usage of a joystick ecosystem. When you don't have multiple inputs like your fingers, there's no "right" way to organize this information. There's also considerations of the tech illiterate and normalizing things to the least common denominator. Everyone that speaks english knows the order of the alphabet but not everyone has learned the order of keys of qwerty (try explaining why the character that follows R is T to the elderly that don't use computers often).

That said, I prefer a split qwerty, or the alphabetical block style that uses 6 characters per row) as it easy to skim quickly when trying to write.