Another day, another set with weird-ass hiragana placement designed for people that can't read it but think it looks cool. This trend really reminds me of people that have Japanese tattoos.
But at least it's got the 「 」 。. 、punctuation sublegends. Not all sets have those. No Ą though.
For constructive feedback, I think most of those novelties have lines too thin and detailed to work. You might want to make them a bit bolder.
The current version of the hiragana sublegends are an adaptation to the ANSI layout. Perhaps you're not familiar with the history. Originally, a designer named MiTo created the first set of GMK sublegends, disappointingly, for the sake of "aesthetics" on GMK Laser. (He kind of has a history now of doing this with various languages.) They were borderline unusable for writing using hiragana, since they lacked both punctuation and furigana. These were later fixed by Zambumon for GMK Serika so that they were at least useable, and here we are.
Therefore, simply dropping Ą into its typical position for JIS would cause issues with other legends, namely backspace. Simply converting the entire top row to JIS doesn't make sense either, since multiple legends rely on the placement of others in the righthand R1-4 cluster.
Here are some of the keys which are
different from our current Hiragana sublegend layout that will need to be made to make JIS a reality.
Proper GMK JIS support will require somewhere in the neighborhood of 20+ new molds, the tooling for which is expensive. It's not just about the alphas either, since the modifier keys and spacebar are also important.
This is something that a number of people in the community are working on, and implementing GMK JIS compatiblity is something I'd personally like to do in future sets.
However, no matter who implements it, JIS will require commitments from vendors and community support to help those kits reach MOQ so that the tooling can exist for any designer to use.
