Typewriters.
They had bars that needed to physically move, and so staggering them helped them not collide and get jammed.
If you imagine a bar coming from the center of each key towards your screen, you can see how the staggering was helpful. For instance, M misses J and K above it, naturally, but it also slightly misses I and the 8 above that.
It’s a great solution for a nonexistent problem in keyboards.
I did the same thing. It was allowed in general, with the correct thought, “if you can code it yourself, you know the content”
I had another “program” that would fail to run but that’s because I wrote notes into it. Doubt that was allowed.