The Market
Understanding the market
Indeed - there isn’t so much a keyboard market (singular) as a venn diagram of overlapping markets (multiple) - and unless you’re a relatively small business looking to make your money serving a small niche at an equally small scale, the “enthusiast” market likely isn’t even on your radar. The vast majority of keyboards bought and sold these days have no reason to have this considered in their design.
This is exactly why I made a point not to harp in switch orientation on this post linking a new budget gasket keeb. It’s got all the check-box features many gamers-who-watch-keeb-enthusiast-videos want, but ultimately this is a product aimed at those gamers, not the enthusiasts whose videos told them Holy Pandas and Creams are cool. Just as you pointed out, quality shine-through performance is enormously more important to the gaming keeb market than being able to mount GMK caps with no issue, and the gaming keeb market absolutely dwarfs the custom one.
In light of that, it is indeed a fool’s errand to crusade against “upside-down” switches.
The Issue
When I first ran into this, I simply noticed that the middle row of my CTRL felt off with its new thick-and-chunky PBT Cherry profile keycaps. I knew something was iffy, but I wasn’t figuring out what was causing it - I just knew it felt bad and sounded inconsistent. It would be months before I watched a :3ildcat video that explained it to me.
I think it’s worth talking about in reviews and such in case the person reading might care about that, but unless we’re talking about something aimed at the custom market, it’s just a bullet-point, not a detractor.
So far, I’ve only had the issue with thick Cherry profile caps and a couple other profiles inspired by Cherry. Plenty of Cherry profile caps do clear the housings regardless of orientation, but not GMK, for example.
I’ve never encountered it on OEM profile. On that note…
OEM Profile:
Now this is just speculation, but I’ve always had the hunch that OEM as a (relative) standard for MX switches came about specifically to accommodate mounting them the “other” way. Even if that’s not the case, I am fairly certain that’s why gaming keyboards use it almost exclusively - it’s tall enough not to matter what direction the switches are facing, even if there’s a big chunky LED soldered in with them. (All LEDs were big and chunky in the late 80s when this profile came to prominence.)
Housing Shape:
I also think this is the solution, wherever a manufacturer sees need to have one. Both Kailh and Gateron have housing designs that will clear R3 GMK caps in either direction. (The Gats cut it close and only some clear, but Kailh’s tapered housings leave plenty of room.) TTC has also recently debuted an “agnostic” housing shape in the form of their Heart/Love/Honey and Tiger switches.
When MX switches were first designed, they were intended to go a certain direction - but MFRs quickly found reasons not to mount them that way - and these days, “right side up” is the minority configuration thanks in no small part to the popularity of back-lighting.
That being the case, I’d love to see every manufacturer adopt housing shapes that render this nit-pick a non-issue across the board. That way, everybody wins - MFRs don’t have to even think about it, gamers and business folk get their back lighting, and enthusiasts can pull out their luxury keycaps - all on the same board. Just imagine… no one would have to learn, hear, or think about this ever again…
“Fatal flaw”
When I think it does make sense to harp on this is when a given keyboard is explicitly aimed towards enthusiasts (or prospective ones), whether or not it’s a “true” custom keyboard. If the product is aiming to include the enthusiast crowd in their sales demographic, it’s a factor worth considering. For just about any other demographic, it’s not even worth thinking about.
There are some products that might be shunned on r/customkeyboards, but still aim for enthusiast sensibilities, if not enthusiast wallets.
That is, people either getting into the custom market, or interested in it without being motivated to spend custom prices. Let’s call boards that would fit in this category “custom-likes”. I think this category is the one where the “North/South” decision isn’t always 100% clear like in most other cases. (Gaming keeb? North. 'Spensive custom? South. Middle-market custom-like? That depends…)
In these cases, I do think it’s worth taking the time to consider who you’re trying to sell the keyboard to and why. If your goal is to sell as many of the keyboard as you can, chances are “South-facing” isn’t the way to go. If your goal is to sell keyboards at a higher price to customers that care about aesthetics, well - it might be worth considering, especially if back-lighting isn’t a factor. Are you wanting to draw some gamers into a more expensive hobby ecosystem where you sell them accessories and tools to go with their boards? South-facing is probably a good idea.
The keeb I first experienced the issue on was a Massdrop CTRL - maybe one of the earlier keebs to try straddling the mass/gamer and enthusiast markets at the same time. If I were selling that model, I’d have at least a little trouble deciding and probably ultimately just offer two PCBs with a markup for South-facing to offset the higher production costs associated with a smaller production run. I wouldn’t blame most businesses for just skipping that headache, but with Drop specifically I think offering an optional “5-pin South-facing” PCB for their alu boards makes sense because of their enthusiast-aesthetic marketing.
Don’t get me wrong - I know most of the CTRLs sold didn’t go to “enthusiasts” and it was almost certainly a financially benecficial decision to only make the “3-pin North-facing” PCB - but enthusiasts did shovel plenty of coal into its hype train, and I do think that’s something at least some keeb companies are thinking about.
I seem to remember HipyoTech making one such complaint about one of the earlier Idobao boards, and in that particular instance, I think it made sense because the board was aimed at folks entering the enthusiast space. It would make absolutely no sense to complain about switcheroo’d switches on something like a Ducky or [ insert Best Buy’s keyboard selection ], as the LED-up orientation better serves their intended functions.
Where I think it gets a little more tricky are those products that in one way or another try to straddle that line, aiming for customers all along the spectrum of “I WANT TFUE KEEB” to “I am obsessed with aesthetics, haptics, and audio”. Keebs like the CTRL, or maybe some of Durgod’s higher-end cast metal keebs, for example. I can think of reasons to go either way with ones like that, but I think a simple heuristic of demographic questions should sort that out for a given product.