No, no correspondence that I saw. Just a pkg on the porch one day.
I remain utterly baffled by the ordering system. I've never seen anything like it and wonder how it even happened.
I suppose in one sense it does make the keycaps seem all the more valuable given the quest like nature of acquiring them. At least you have a story to tell at your next dinner party, a funny point of entry into your bizarre and obsessive hobby.
Still, it's a bit nerve wracking given that you place your order, wait 2+ years, then realize you left one piece off or got one key wrong? Are you going to wait another 2 years for that properly sized spacebar? That actually happened to me with my order since I was buying "leftovers". I left the spacebar off. Fortunately I was able to find the correct color code and get one from PMK for $9 in under a week to complete the set, but keys with legends wouldn't be so simple.
I get that this isn't all on 7bit, and I'm sure he's taking on a huge workload for not much renumeration, but to me that suggests that a better process would benefit him too.
It seems also, just from other posts here, that a lot of the delay has to do with SP's schedule. I don't quite know what to make of that either. They're clearly interested in the enthusiast market or they wouldn't have put up PMK, but that site is reliably sold out of product. That, and they're scheduled out a year in advance? If I were running a business with a years worth of backlogged orders and a sold out storefront, I'd borrow money if I had to to buy more equipment and grow the business. I mean geez, you have people lined up to pay you $100+ for a few dozen hunks of molded plastic, the markup has got to be pretty damn good. The market might be small but it's growing.
Anyway, I just ordered 2 sets of maxkey SAs from kbdfans. Haven't got them yet, but it's 2 days later and they're already shipped (from china) with a tracking number. The sets themselves are rather basic, not as gloriously obsessive as 7bits (the arrow keys are especially ugly), but hopefully a larger library of legends will come with time.