Inuits have put a thousand or more years of development into the kayak. With all the modern brain power that we have put into our kayaks nobody has been able to get very far away from what the Inuits gave us.
When you have time start reading thru' the archives of this site. There are brainstorms on every page and not one went anywhere. The usual reasons were;
They were impractical.
They were unsafe.
They violated the laws of Newtonian Mechanics.

: So, I'm 9 strips in on the bottom of my boat, and already I'm thinking about
: the next stages.

: After reading an article on making your own neoprene spray skirt, and still
: trying to figure out how my complex curved cockpit area will work with a
: spray skirt and drainage (I don't want to add a vertical coaming if I can
: help it) it occurred to me that I would already have a piece of deck the
: right shape to fit the hole perfectly.

: The reason for the traditional big cockpit cutout is for ease of entry and
: exit. What if we used a much smaller neoprene skirt (just big enough to
: get your hips through), and mounted ourselves in the middle of a 'hatch'
: instead? You'd still be able to pull the hatch to escape if you ended up
: upside down and unable to roll back up, but you could do away with the big
: unsightly coaming, and all that wet neoprene.

: The question is has anyone made/used a hard skirt?