Another annoyance, is how many of the LED back-lit keys only light up the top half of the legends on keys with shift functions. That is just bad design to begin with and should have been addressed at the root level at the drawing board.
Backlit keyboards weren't invented when the Cherry MX switch was introduced in 1983 :-)
One of the things I liked about the KBParadise V60 is that they rotated all the switches so that the LEDs are at the fronts of the switches (instead of at the back as with the Poker II), meaning that front-printed legends are illuminated; I used to get really annoyed with my Poker II as the front printing for the Fn layer was so poorly lit that I couldn't read the legends and it was a pain trying to figure out the Fn layer. Now I just run it at maximum brightness and enough light is reflected from the inside of the keycap that it gets around the fact that the LED is at the side of the switch with the shell and slider blocking the light.
People are indeed going back to the drawing board on this, as the following companies now make switches targeted towards even backlighting:
Matias (the first to the market)
Cherry, with the MX RGB
Omron, with the Romer-G
Kailh, with the PG-something series used by Steelseries
It's become a really big deal for switch makers to sort this problem out, which I agree with you looks really terrible, doubly so when the keycaps have those cramped "all uppercase" legends to ram the glyphs around the optimal backlit spot. I really hate that! KBParadise compromised the best to my mind: LEDs at the front, illuminating the lowercase glpyhs and the front printing.
I also don't care for backlight bleed around the keys either, which the Romer-G switch is supposed to help with as it tries to guide the light entirely to where it's wanted, and blocked from going anywhere else. Of course, some of these approaches mean a new keycap mount.