Same situation here! I was a vertical tab hater for quite a while but I’m really liking Zen’s UI so far

The new Futo Keyboard is phenomenal. All the features of Google keyboard/swiftkey but completely local and open source with on-device speech to text if you use voice typing (with models you can swap out yourself if you want).

Just make sure to download the latest pre-release version as it fixes a bunch of bugs and adds missing stuff compared to the ‘stable’ release.