a direct wired production keyboard would be hilarious, but would also cost a million dollars. all production keyboards have electrical wiring a proper FR-4 PCB. the major thing that varies between the pcbs vended by the different keyboard manufacturers is the amount of copper (very little is needed to carry signal, but a more copper and more fiberglass means that the pcb is more rigid and provides more support to the switches. additionally, PCB circuits can have anywhere from 1 to 8 layers. inter-layer communication is carried over something called a via (which is what the company VIA is actually named after -- fun fact!) which is just a metallized hole in a layer that connects to a trace on another layer. the maximum number of layers you would ever need on a cherry PCB is basically 2. if you're using more than that you're basically doing it wrong. topre PCBs are almost all 4-layer pcbs, but then again, they are capacitive, which is very very tricky to work out electrically, and they have no metal plates.
almost all production cherry or cherry-like boards these days use metal plates and the corresponding plate-mount cherry switches (although note that pcb-mount switches are fully plate-compatible, they just have extra studs to further attach themselves mechanically to the PCB. the plate thickness of a cherry switch is fixed at 0.06", or about 16 gauge in imperial sheet measurement terms. however, the material is completely open, and some keyboards have aluminum plates (NOT rigid, extremely flexible until you get to aerospace grade aluminum alloys), mild annealed steel (the least rigid of all steels, and what ducky tends to use), high carbon steels (which i'm not aware of anyone using) or stainless steel (i can confirm that most if not all of the CM Storm quickfire series uses a stainless steel alloy for their plates). i've written briefly about how solid i feel the CM storm stainless plates are. i also think the red powdercoated one looks BOSS. that said, like levar burton would say, "you don't have take my word on it.. take a look, it's in a book reading rainbow!"
ok it's a keyboard not a book, but you get the idea.
