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Why yes that is also a keyboard.

What do you suppose the odds are that a gaming-peripheral manufacturer sat down and came up with a better switch implementation than any that the mechanical keyboard community could?

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Optical/Hall Effect switches generally require special PCBs some part of the sensing is often surface mounted to the pcb instead of integrated into the switch housing. There is a hall effect board coming out the mechanical keyboard community called the Keystone (https://kono.store/blogs/keyboards/the-future-of-keyboards)) but generally speaking such an undertaking is to big for the community in general. Requiring both full switch design (generally new switches from the community are simply tweaks to existing designs, maybe just a slight adjustment to the stem, spring, or leaf) or new layouts using existing switch footprints (generally speaking just the cherry mx footprint, but there are quite a few pcbs that will support cherry mx and old ALPs/Matias switches.

Very high.

Almost all switches I’ve seen made by the community are simply Frankenstein switches made with different springs, housings, or stems from other switches.

For example, all the “Holy Pandas” are is a stem from one brand of switch (halo clear/true) combined with the housing from another (invyr panda).

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