Out of curiosity, why the aversion to MassDrop? If anything, it's a selling point for me.
Mostly because of their closed ecosystem. But also, because of the shipping fiasco with TA.
Perhaps, because I haven't had issue with MassDrop yet, I'm not seeing the closed ecosystem issue. Would it be possible to elaborate on this?
The TA shipping wasn't fun at all. The first time out, I'm cool with it being their fault as much as GMKs fault. People getting bad replacement sets was pretty cringe worthy though. That part should have been fixed by MD of course, and eventually was.
Still, I am more prone to use MD because when **** does hit the fan, like TA, they generally speaking handled getting everyone refunded or squared away much quicker than a community run buy would have. You alway shave the comfort knowing you can get a refund from them if you do have issues with what you get, which often isnt the case otherwise because that money is just gone.
They also seem to try to find and make cool things for the community in my experience as well. Yeah, some stuff on there is just ****, but others are quite nice. Haata has mentioned in one of the interviews with him that they paid for a lot of the development and samples of things like the Infinity 60% and ErgoDox Infinity, things that otherwise would have been very hard to fund/produce.
So there are definitely ups and downs, of course, but I definitely don't side hard left or right on the matter and just see them as a company trying to make money, but also a company that at least tries to interact with the community much more than companies in other hobbies I've been part of. End of the day, yes, they are trying to make money. I don't really have an issue with that though, they are a company, not a community member after all.