Thanks for the progress report and sharing your experiences!
I've found stock ML's to be a bit disappointing myself for a number of reasons:
1. They're scratchy.. worse than Browns in my experience.
2. With the shorter travel and hard bottom out I find I experience a bit more finger shock with them than my MX boards, although I'm sure I could get used to the shorter travel and not have a problem with this in time.
3. The off-axis increase in friction is distracting. The narrower spacing on most ML boards means the key centres are not where you're used to, so off-axis hits occur often. This causes them to have more friction in the best cases and almost get stuck in the worst cases and can really break my flow when typing.
4. The stock keycaps are decent, but a little loose and this contributes to the off-axis "stiction".
So I played around with them a bit and have managed to improve them enough to actually enjoy them.
1. Lubing them does wonders. It reduces the scratchiness to almost nothing. Even better, it reduces off-axis friction a LOT. I have yet to try "proper" Krytox on them, but my tests with silicone lube (quite thin) have worked nicely.
2. Adding a really thin (around 0.2mm I'd guess?) slice from a silicone oring as a "trampoline mod" in the centre tube helps a lot with bottom-out shock.
3. With an "in-between" spacing, 18.5mm, I found I hit them off-centre much less.
4. I got some samples of Family13 keycaps from SP and they are better than the stock ones (although quite expensive if you're just ordering a few).
With the top 2 mods I really enjoy using ML switches. They're not as nice as my plate mounted, 62g, stickered, lubed, trampoline modded ErgoClears with SA keycaps in an aluminium case, but they're not all that far off.. Without the mods I just can't use them for very long without massive frustration. The biggest problem is I find they're a real pain to dismantle when mounted on a PCB, but it can be done if you're patient. So I recommend trying lubing and trampolines if you want to "revive" your board.