It would nice if someone who works for Cherry would ever post here, but I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon. Black switches are most commonly used in POS keyboards, so the retooling was probably nothing more than needing new molds because the old ones were worn out. Their POS customers just want something reliable. They don't particularly care about how smooth the switch is or how loud it is.
And this is why Cherry has no need to post here, or to care about anybody's feedback of their switches. They likely never will. If what they've got sells well enough the way it is in the industrial and POS markets, they have no reason to invest the time and resources into fielding feedback from enthusiasts, most of whom don't even buy genuine Cherry switches. That's even before they would then have to act on that feedback and potentially retool whole product lines, or come out with new variants, etc.
I did buy one of the newer TG3 "cop keyboards" to crack open and I found that it uses some weird linear membrane mechanism (dome kludge added just beneath the caps and all) now instead of MX blacks. I wonder if that has anything to do with Cherry's sudden decision to release their Viola switches. It could be that even those markets are seeing that they can get away with something cheaper without sacrificing the reliability they desire.
