I think this whole problem is caused by two very different kind of consumers coming together to form their opinions about a premium product.
There are two kinds of quality/value, and that's where the problem lies. There's horizontal/breadth value, which involves things that are order qualifiers, but not order winners. Vertical/depth quality deals with order winners and how much development has gone into those features.
Qualifiers are features that get you to consider an item, but not necessarily choose that item over a competitor. For example, an order qualifier for a particular car is that it can take you across town on a tank of gas and starts up in normal winter temperatures. Great, you can consider this car. But if the manufacturer made a new car where the gas tank is twice as large and figured out a way to have the car start up in extreme-cold weather, it wouldn't really do any more to convince you to buy that new car over first one that does the what you need (assuming you live near gas stations and not in the Arctic) already.
Winners are features that will justify purchasing one option over another—hence, it "wins" the order. In the car example, this might look like more comfortable seating or better mileage, because these contribute directly to your driving experience and overall value in a linear way. If fuel efficiency matters to you, a car with better mileage will cause you to pick that one over one with average mileage. If you care about comfort, a car with an extremely comfy seat will beat out a car with just comfy seats. In this case, further improvement in winners has bearing on persuading consumers to choose the product.
Now back to the boards. One way to look at it is that some consumers are looking for horizontal value—they want tons and tons of features that don't add to the product's main utility but add to their idea of total value. This would be all the fluffy features, like having backlighting when you type in a well-lit room, or USB ports for your coffee mug, or dedicated extra keys for every conceivable action for every app you use. None of these things really improve the typing experience, but their convenience sort of appeals to some/most consumers.
Then there are us badass people here on Geekhack, who (mostly) buy keyboards because we plan on... you know, using them to type on. We would pay a lot of attention to the vertical dimension of value—we want our boards to feel comfortable while we type, to last longer than our housepets, to be very loud (or quiet), and to be infinitely reliable. Point is, we have very specific needs with regards to the core functionality of our boards, things most people don't even bother to notice, much less think and talk about. I like to say, we care about what makes a keyboard a keyboard.
Anyway, that's why people like that reviewer and the user gave a Topre board such a crappy rating. They are looking for all the wrong features/indicators of quality, according to our standards. They are breadth-consumers, and not depth-consumers. In terms of order winners and qualifiers, they have their priorities reversed.
To breadth-consumers, order qualifiers are winners, if you can cram in enough of them. This is probably mostly because of ignorance—if there are no other dimensions by which we measure quality, then the only way to add value is to cram in more qualifiers. They actually look at quantity of qualifiers as an order winner since they may be unaware of anything else.
To Geekhackers, the switches in themselves are the winning aspect of the board—the feel is second to none, they are reliable, etc... (the rest of the usually cited reasons why HHKB and Realforce are so great). We look at core functionality—how delicious is the typing experience on the board?—to base our purchase decisions on. This is why some of us don't care about frilly things like media keys or backlighting—at least not until we are talking about boards that are otherwise identical in terms of switches, build quality, etc... It's not that USB ports and volume controls don't matter at all—it's just that they (may) only begin to matter after you sort out the important things first, like what switches you'll use, how will they be mounted, is the board sturdy, how are the caps made, etc...
Anyway, long story short, you've got two kinds of consumers (breadth vs depth, layman vs expert) looking to get very different things (more order qualifiers vs better order winners) to spend their money on. I am of the persuasion that as you become more knowledgable about the product category, you will naturally move from breadth to depth consumption, but some/many people are often content with blissful ignorance (and I mean that in a non-condescending way).
If you've never tried a mech-board and you haven't had any problems with rubber-domes, don't look into switching. You'll save lots of money (though really, you'd be missing out hard). :wink:
