I like mechanical keyboards because it's a great medium for getting gradually better at the electrical side of geeky hobbies. I'm horrible with circuits and was forced to do 4 semesters of them in college and I was convinced I would never touch an arduino at all. It started small, I spilled beer all over my first store-bought keyboard and had to desolder 16 switches to clean them and let them dry. I bought a 20 dollar soldering station and some phenomenally massive solder, watched the EEVBlog tutorials and went to town. A few months later I did a switch swap for a work board, turning an MX Black Ducky into an Ergo Clear board; about 2 months after that I ordered an Ergo Dox and was introduced to SMD soldering for the first time.
Now I'm about halfway done with the parts list for a custom workman matrix layout split keyboard for work and I couldn't be happier