but thanks to a recent post on the hackaday blog, which led me to an even older article titled "One man’s adventures in custom keyboard development"

the old project just begged to be given another chance - so it was unearthed, the remaining (and rather dusty) parts reexamined, disassembled, recycled/disposed and soon new prototypes followed:

... but going back to the monolithic parts was a bad motivation wise...

stripping the parts to an absolute minimum helped, but they still took too long to build

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turned out that using everyones favorite construction toy helped a lot!

it now became relatively easy and fast to print a minimal keyboard matrix making (slightly) changes to the curvature or the column/row layout, change the amount of tilt (or more exotic stuff like "tenting", ...)

as a bonus it became a breeze to add attachments to the prototypes to see how well the various combinations would work out :-D