Hello, and happy New Year. I haven't "built" any keyboards myself, but I recently swapped some switches in a secondhand K65. I think that if you're just getting into mechanical keyboards, a hot swap board is probably the way to go. I've bought a bunch of random keyboards as mystery boxes just to feel the switches, and sometimes I have struck out with things like Cherry MX brown. I must have ... 15 mechanical keyboards now? (Who's counting?) and I still keep wondering if I should get a hotswap board to try out switches, and especially various configurations of mixed switches in.