By pressing the switch multiple times to get a feel on how it best touches the finger, my current plan is a single 45-degree bend that starts 4mm to the end:

I was able to use a G-clamp for a quick experiment:

I basically held this up infront of the CAD model on my monitor and aligned the bend. 

The 45° bend sufficiently allows the finger to slide over the lever and not catch/scrape on the sharp edge, similar to the little tabs in a USB-A port.

At this new bend, the forces for actuation and reset are 17g and 10.5g respectively.

The switches arrived and here are the specs:

• Length: 54.5mm
• Actuation: 15g
• Reset: 9g
• Angle at...
  • Rest: 12°
  • Reset: 8°
  • Actuation: 4°
• Distance from actuation to reset: About two and a quarter millimetres (2.25mm)
  • I'm just judging by eye. It's certainly under 3mm.
• Sound from 10cm: +45dB, with the peak in the 7000Hz zone.

  • This is much quieter than my Z-88 Typewriter-style keyboard, which has blue switches.

Sound profile comparison

Below are screenshots on the sound profiles. The bluish graph moves downwards, so the most recent noise would be at the top edge of it.

KW11 switch from 10cm away

KW11 and blue-mechanical switch from 40cm away

Looking for a long hinge lever microswitch

I started off this project by looking at what long-lever microswitches were available, and I only found 1 listing of the large variety that had NO and COM on the short edge.

I was about to checkout, but I decided to first draw up a simple sketch in Fusion and discovered that it was going to be too big to place in the Datahand / Svalboard configuration. I tried with the smaller KW11 microswitch, which surprisingly has a similar lever width (4.5 vs 3.9mm), but it's still too large.

I thought this project was over, but after half a week elapsed, I had the idea of diagonal movements. For the KW11-D, they are small enough for this to work:

Additionally, the movements necessary are easier as they rely more on the dominant "north / south" movement than the #lalboard - Ergonomic Keyboard / Svalboard / CharaChorder that also need "east / west" movements.

I then proceeded to look all over the internet for options. The KW11 switch is the most abundant and is 18p/ea on AliExpress. Next is the KW12, the silver-contact, green variant of the KW11 at around 40p. After that are Digikey options over 50p and mouse switches that don't come with a lever at all.

I read on the internet that silver contacts are used in applications when arcing (due to high voltage) is expected. The arc cleans off the insulating tarnish of the silver, which wouldn't happen for a USB peripheral. Thus, unless I wanted to pay double for the (admittedly nice) green, I stuck with the standard KW11.

We have a [long lever microswitch] at home

I have a bag of roller-lever switches that looks very similar, and I was able to stick 3 of them together to emulate the placement of the keys and how it'll feel.

I pressed one against a scale and it was nominally 95gf. To get values more representative of the 55mm-long lever microswitches, I broke some toothpicks to length and squeezed them into the gap between the red roller and the 0.4mm thick, stainless-steel lever. The result was nominally 28gf.

Something I noticed is that the angle (between the lever and enclosure) to close the switch is smaller than the angle to open it again:

Thus, the practical linear travel distance on the end of the toothpick is over 4mm just to reach the actuation point. While it's twice as far as a standard keyboard switch, I believe it will reduce misclicks (e.g. intending to press 1 switch but accidentally pressing 2).