Yah, reverse being left and forward is pretty common. It would feel natural to me as well, without my having thought about why, 
I think manual transmission people are used to whatever, because you know that there’s no choice in the matter. Gears are arranged however they have to be to make the internals work as needed. Anyone who’s driven a few tractors experiences this first hand. You’ve got somewhere between 10-20 gears, and they are arranged in some insane pattern that makes no sense visually, but it’s how it had to be done. Usually it’s a double or triple HH pattern, and often adjacent gears are in completely different HH zones, requiring about six moves to get from one to the next. 
For a while in the 1970s John Deere was using sequential dog boxes, which made a lot of sense, actually. Not sure why they stopped. Maybe there were maintenance issues with them.
