I dislike having the hyphens key as a dead key

Yeah, that sucks. You can have the best of both worlds in Linux by using the US keyboard with the “English (intl., with AltGr dead keys)” keyboard variant. This way, all your qwerty keys will work normally, but you can tell it a key combination is coming up by tapping AltGr. So you can for instance type <AltGr> + <"> + <u> to make ü or <AltGr> + <s> + <s> for ß. If I remember correctly, there is a way to make Windows do the same.

And in KDE at least, you can use any key you like to perform the function of AltGr. I suppose other DE’s can do the same.