^ Yup, exactly. You can create many new keyboards, but as long as they're using the same weird dictionary, nothing's gonna change.

I was actually looking at this while trying to create an alphanumeric keyboard with T9.. turns out you can implement it with your own custom dictionary, but you'll need a Qt environment to read and parse the dict. in real time (for providing suggestions), so it's not "easy" or "appealing" enough for devs to get this done.

Still not giving up on trying to achieve this though.. I'm a fan of T9.