I haven't owned a GAF or KK cap yet, nor have I had any interactions with the makers behind the two brands, but I do clearly remember my first impressions of them.
It was mid 2017 when I was still only a few months into this hobby. I had recently bought my third keyboard, an HHKB, and I was ready to open it up and Novatouch it. While this task was simple enough I still wanted some reference on how to handle detaching the ribbon cable that connects the daughter board to the main PCB and the best method for popping out the sliders. One of the first results on Google was a post on KeyKollectiv's blog (
https://www.keykollectiv.com/blog//redefining-endgame) and I remember it being a nice read, much more detailed than the r/mk posts I was used to.
Wanting to learn a bit more about who was behind this blog post I continued reading the KeyKollectiv blog and it was then immediately apparent to me that this was an artisan maker. Now, at the time, I didn't know much at all about artisans. I would see endless mechmarket posts looking for artisan trades and I would see them on r/mk adorned on top of a nice custom keyboard every now and then but I had no idea where they came from or even their appeal. But reading the blog I could see there was a great deal of passion behind these artisans and the keycaps featured in photos on the blog looked particularly cute to me. I then looked up a bit more about KeyKollectiv and remember reading somewhere that the maker behind KeyKollectiv was also behind GAF but I had no idea what GAF was. Was this another brand of cute artisan keycaps? This got me googling and reading about artisans some more and I learned that artisans were typically based on a hand carved sculpt and resin cast in a multi-step process, a great deal of work went into making these keycaps indeed! I also learned that people would make a hobby out of collecting certain sculpts or colorways, spending a great deal of time organizing trades and entering raffles to get the caps they were after. I started to understand why a community existed around these keycaps and why people would be so passionate about them.
Fast-forward to the present, and a few lucky raffle wins latter, and I now have an artisan collection one dozen strong! However there still aren't any GAF or KK caps in that collection, hopefully that changes soon.
P.S. That HHKB remains my most used keyboard today.