Well, I just bit at the bait. I eyed it for a good few days here too... $50 is money I really don't have right now, but it looks like I'm spending it anyway. I'll be putting some other projects on hold for a month or two, and praying for extra hours...
Personally, I think it's simply a harder sell when it's these
massive sets like this one. Last years 8 key set seemed to do very nicely for a base cost of $25. Ultimately, it got culled down to 8, and all seemed well. Honestly I sorta kinda expected something similar to happen to this one, but discussion only centered on replacing colorways, not eliminating colorways or dupes. This set just seems... "Spammingly yuge!". It's literally only four key legends and four colorways with a "one of each combo" as it's philosophy.
I have little to no interest in the metallic keys (though others seem to love them, so I concede that). Even the nifty polycarbonate keys are just dupes of the blues. I guess I really only even care about vaults (or places) in yellow on blue (or grey). I think everyone wants unique bombs, so having bombs in all the available colorways is fine. The other icons (such as the BoS helmet, in this case), would work very well in the metallic, as is also the case with the Lucky 38 key. BoS might have done well inverted, with the "Steel" on a black backdrop (or another color). I guess to me, the Lucky 38 and the vault in the polycarb variants seem like they'd be out of place extras. Cool as individual keys, but not as part of an organized cluster, like I'd have. There's also only so many keys to put keycaps on! This is what will be seeing use of these keys, and I'll probably only use about 5 of them, tops. If more vaults came out, or I got Nuka Colas (I can dream), or other unique iconographic key caps (like the BoS helmet), It'd likely replace the colored top row on the number pad with those. If anything, I'd do my best to try to color match as much as I can cobble, with what I have, and replace some of the Danger Zone specialty keys with vaults. If I could collect enough vaults, I might even consider having vaults AS function keys... Maybe someday...
Still... It's like the gatdurned pok-e-mans... Gotta catch 'em all...
Even the keys i don't use... I probably will just stuff in a drawer somewhere.
To this day, I wish i'd known about these things when I could still have snagged a Vault 13 or a Nuka Cola... I cri e'rry time...
That is why I will eat ramen for the next month.
One more idea... I saw someone use their bomb keys as Page Up/Down or Home/End keys. That was a pretty creative use for the bombs... It occurs to me, that if you ever set us up the bomb that's parallel tot eh key edge, as opposed to being set at a 45° angle to the edge, Then that might open the possibility of a whole new line of bomb keys that could function as arrows, or other directional applications (such as Home/End, WASD, etc). Offering the option of one bomb or multiples 2 or 4 bombs of a single colorway (in a potential future GB), especially if a directional bomb design were implemented, could make for the ability to bump the quantities of a single color way up, helping the price, as well as providing a use beyond mere decorative novelty. I mean, you can kinda do this with he bombs, as is, but it just opens an idea for the future, something new.
