Hello, I currently daily drive a 1986 Model M, and I love the thing. It's built like a tank, weighs like 5lb, and will probably outlive me. Because "endgame" is eternally unreachable, I've been trying to find something similar made today.
I'm ideally looking at a TKL board, but anything could work, as long as it has arrow keys (so most 60% boards are out). In a perfect world, I'd like one with hotswappable switches, as I'm a huge fan of MX Greens and BOX Navies (neither of which tend to come new on prebuilts), but I'm willing to swap switches the hard way if need be.
Currently, the two boards I'm looking at are the Leopold FC750R PD and the GMMK Pro with doubleshot keycaps, but neither is perfect. The Leopold seems durable enough, but I've heard the PCB doesn't take to kindly to a desoldering pump, and there's no QMK/VIA support (not a requirement, but nice). The GMMK Pro has all the bells and whistles (Metal Case, QMK, Hotswap, USB-C), but durability is a big question mark, and I'd have to go find a keycap set.
I have looked at Unicomp, but their boards seem to be pretty crappy at this point, and still have the heat-staked plastic supports of the old Model Ms which will eventually fail. Model F Keyboards seem built like a tank, but the layout is too weird.
Essentially, my question is the following: is there a modern equivalent to the old Model M? Something focused on durability and longevity above all else. I'm thinking the Leopold is probably what I'll end up with (coming in classic beige does help), but is there anything else in the same vein?