Fair, but that’s on them (not TG) and (I suspect) has more to do with the lack of other people doing similar work than it is a product of how he talks about switches; a vacuum exists and he’s one of the only people filling it. There are, of course, Twitch/Youtube reviewers but their work is… not as searchable and usually lacking in any kind of thoroughness/rigor, which stinks. Other fields of products have a huge advantage over ours in that they have lots of reviewers poring over the same products and people can seek out the ones whose tastes align with their own (or whose tastes are simply very obvious and their observations can be metered based on those).
I don’t know that “score padding” is entirely accurate, since they’re just subjective things that account for his personal taste and interest, which are totally normal in reviews of any product or media (but especially here in keyboards where most things are deeply subjective). This is equivalent to, for instance, me saying that I like sharp tactiles more than rounded tactiles; he has just attached numbers to that in a way I don’t. TG actually provides a “Hard Total” composite score sheet in his linked Switch Scores github that has these removed from the scores for people who don’t want his taste included in things.
Sure, but nobody’s board is really equivalent to anybody else’s board, so I have a hard time imagining a world where full board testing produces meaningfully more useful results and insights than on-tester testing—which is actually an achievable standardization for anybody—can produce. But I’d love to see more people doing it! And I want more people to fill up this space with their thoughts and findings on switches!
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