Have you considered moving all of the QWEASD keys down a line and then using 123456 and QWERTY? that gives you a full hotbar without any modifiers that are all relatively close together.

I dunno how tied you are to using a mouse, either, but my first MMO was FFXI which had terrible mouse controls, so I set up my controls in FFXIV so that my arrow keys move the camera and the numpad moves my character, I could theoritically use 123456 QWERTY and ASDFGH for hot keys. (right now I use AWSD for targeting.)