It’s never going to be the same, unfortunately. I do wish I had started caring about my ergonomics before I got hurt again though. I was a huge fool to think that a “good looking” keyboard was more important than a keyboard that was built for human usage for so many years.

Also, don’t skateboard folks. At 15 I got some sick permanent titanium parts from the first broken arm, and then at 37 I broke the same arm doing the same crap and it sucked. 6+ months later and it still hurts and I will never regain the same range of motion.

Also, to answer the root question: The keywells and contoured design are 1000000000% worth $200.

Nope, but I had several coworkers that swore by Advantage2s. I broke my left arm for the second time in my life last year and one of them implored me to try their extra Advantage2 so they lent me one, and I haven’t had wrist or shoulder pain since. I bought my 360 before I could even touch type on that borrowed Advantage2.

FWIW I love my Kinesis Advantage 360 Pro. I did initially have connectivity problems but it’s been solid since. There’s also a beta 3.0 firmware which I am now running that is much, much more stable. The configuration is the same for any ZMK board, so I didn’t have issues since I have been using ZMK for a while on other boards. It has a learning curve but it’s relatively simple and for basic remapping the GUI works well.

Not to mention, some of these devs probably have pretty massive equity stakes on the table here. It’s not a trivial decision to simply walk away from that.