This is pretty normal. You'll notice that not many people stick around longer than a few years on here. Hell, I wouldn't be on here nearly as much (possibly at all) if I weren't a mod. Kind of a weird thing to think about, since the hobby was once such a big and important thing in my life, but we move on and try new things. As long as you had fun along the way, it was worth it.
My RF10AE hasn't left my desk in probably 4 years now, aside from the occasional need to swap to something with a numpad. Not much need to geek out over keyboards when you're content and aren't buying things anymore (which, let's admit it, is basically the heart and soul of the actual "hobby" - not counting the friendships and other more meaningful things you get out of it).
It's weird that I'm content with a keyboard I didn't like for the first four or five years I owned it (at least for now). The people here are why I still come back. I think the mix of the hobby and the people is why this was a weird feeling. Every other hobby doesn't involve anyone else, so I can drop it without much change. Dropping this hobby entirely would mean not being here as well, but as mentioned in this thread, that's what Off Topic is for.
I'm new to keebs, but I can heavily relate to this from my other/first main hobby. I simply found what works in general and what works for me. Sure, I could keep up with all the latest and greatest, but why would I? At the end of the day, there's nothing coming out that's so groundbreaking as to be worth the time investment into checking the other thousand products that'll happen between now and then. When something truly revolutionary does come along, I'll hear about it whether I'm directly involved with and on top of that hobby or not.
Maybe I'm just a young'un here, but I'm sitting in 10 keyboard discords, another 10 other servers, and then 80 others that I basically never touch. If you've ever got questions about discord feel free to ask, the biggest thing that I've found helpful is figuring out what channels you don't need to be looking at and then muting them. If there's 100 channels in a server, chances are you can mute anywhere from 20-95 of them depending on just how involved you want to be.
Good point on hearing about big new things regardless. With keyboards, maybe FOMO was affecting me. Even if you do hear about something awesome but you miss out on it, it may never come back, or it'll be YEARS. It's funny; there was some 75% board that I was in love with and whose IC and GB I followed for over a year just waiting for the sale to open, and it sold out in something like 21 seconds (all the interest seemed to have come rather late in the GB as well). I was ready for it, but I still missed it by about seven seconds. Despite how long I followed it and how disappointing that was, I haven't thought about it again until just now.
I am in a lot of Discord servers just because I *might* want to look into them later, but I really tried to participate in a language learning Discord server at one point, but I couldn't even keep up with *one* channel because there was so much chatter on it. When someone replied to me, I couldn't even see my own text on the screen at the same time as the reply most of the time.
Part of me is worried about this happening to myself (I'm only on my second week of being interested in keebs), but at the end of the day I'm largely here to get better tools. I spend 8-14hrs a day behind a keyboard at both work and home, getting a properly nice setup that fits me is an investment - especially with split boards for better ergos to try and avoid future issues I can already feel creeping in. There's some really, really nice rigs out there, but I don't need a $1200 piece of art to run reports at work or hold long-winded discussions on discord. I just need a nice piece of equipment that'll last me years of feeling good to type on. The enjoyment of building it myself is just a bonus that allows me to get exactly what fits.
It's not abnormal or unwarranted to "grow out of" a hobby. But at the same time, it's a hobby. There's no required level of interest or interaction. If you just want to be around to vibe with older setups, I'm sure you're not the only one. There's no membership requirement saying you have to be able to give a dissertation on the Pandaverse and what upcoming group by most closely resembles their switch feel. Noobs like me still need the "old-timers" like you to remind us that it's just a keyboard, it's okay to not be a collector, and to answer the inevitable questions of "hey what's this thing?" when everyone else is too focused on the new hotness to remember how the longstanding setups were.
The biggest issue is not being able to try anything before buying. Every single build is an experiment. I tried to maximize the number of differences per build to try as many things at once as I could (different layout, plate material, mounting method, switches, keycaps), but then it's hard to tell which variables matter. Oddly my brother became interested in mechs recently, so, at least, I was able to let him sample a smorgasbord of switches and keycaps to form an opinion (I think he ended up with a GMMK with BOX Royals and maybe some SA caps on the way).
I think was long as your expectations are reasonable, you'll be ok. Just don't expect to replicate the sounds you hear on Youtube unless you spend ungodly hours on your builds and experiment with different lubes and such. I got somewhat close to replicating the "Lubed Vintage MX Black" sound I always hear in videos by desoldering a bunch of MX Blacks from a couple old PCBs, lubing them, and then going through each one, feeling them individually, and binning them as "sucks", "ok", and "good". Aaaand those ended up in a board I don't use because it's a weird layout.
Theres the off topic forum if we're not interested in keyboards anymore..
Haha, I pretty much live in Off Topic here. I rarely venture anywhere else now.
I don't think I ever understood keyboards as a hobby any more than headphones or watches (other interests/forums I've been active in) so I'm always an outsider. I come, I learn, I get something more suited to my use than the standard off the shelf item and then, if possible, I help newbies in some way to stave off offline boredom. Only keyboards have much scope for the last bit and that's why I've been active for most of the time I've been a member here while the other forums I disappear for years on end and may never return.
Sintpinty has it right - if you don't want to talk about keyboards there's always Off Topic and Other Geeky Stuff if you want some input from a varied and knowledgable group of strangers on the internet.
That's how this started for me. I just wanted something better than MX Blues. Somehow I heard about the Model M, and all my Google searches kept bringing me to Geekhack. I bought a couple Model Ms, and I joined the Ellipse Model F GB because it seemed like the logical progression. It was supposed to be a quick in and out. I got the keyboard I wanted, but I think what got me hooked was the Rama M65-A GB. I joined because it was originally a raffle that I was sure I wouldn't win, and then it became an unlimited GB, so I was invoiced and had to stick around and check for updates.
But at this point, I stick around for the discussion with you folks. There's the right blend of anonymity yet object permanence around here that real discussions and personalities emerge.