So Evan is from Nebraska. Me too (living in CA now, though). I'd like to support him and his products.
But I'm SO confused about the backhand comments about minivans I see posted on rmk, and the pretty nasty comments on gh from creators whose products I respect.
Any clarification?
I'd just like to not get burned on a keyset purchase. I almost jumped on GMK Necro, but luckily saw the GH thread and saved myself $200. That's not an insignificant amount.
I'm pretty sure the whole thing can be summarized as follows:
Awhile back, at the beginning of 2018, Evan started gathering feedback/interest in his new keycap profile, called Hub. It was a neat deal where you get a good number of keysets for a very reasonable price (forgetting the whole need to fund doubleshot molds and machines). At some point during this IC phase renders/mock-ups of Hub in various popular colorways such as Hyperfuse, Royal Alpha, Jukebox, Hack'd by Geeks, Troubled Minds/Noctilucous, Nuclear Data, Muted, Sky Dolch appeared (if they were not already on there) on the Kickstarter page.
Since then mock-ups of colorways like Zambumon's Jamon, and Calm Depths can be seen on The Van Keyboards instagram page. I believe during the Kickstarter many popular designers expressed their disappointment in Evan not reaching out to them prior to featuring these popular colorways (some adaptations of old sets, some direct copies of original ideas) as something he could be making money from.
From what I understand, the lack of Minivan support is a direct response to this and this set seems to be a response to that in so far as if no one will feature Minivan series support, Evan will not feature support for literally any layout other than the Minivan family.
Beyond the keycap designer quarrels, in my opinion this is a bad move purely just due to the fact that these are custom colors and unless Evan will be willing to pick up whatever remainder of the MoQ is left, it very likely won't hit MoQ. More well thought out and planned sets with more compatibility have failed to hit MoQ at the non-custom color mark.
TL;DR:
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=95882.msg2695276#msg2695276