Lol its scary you are sounding a lot like a good friend of mine.
The only way I was able to get him to be happy with hand space was to switch him to the grip shifters.
But another thing is look into if I were you would be to see if you can slide the brake and shifters more tward the center of the bar and get some wider grips.

This is an example of what I had to do to his bike (not his barrowed this from a Google search)