My best guess is that they're not important decisions to their target audience.

I've been using a kinesis advantage for years, and I'm seriously considering getting one of these.

I do not at all care about ZMK vs QMK -- I don't even know why I should care.

RGB underglow? I don't even care that it's there, let alone programmable key backlights.

I care about ergonomics. The selling point is the split, and bluetooth/wireless capability, on top of all the existing ergonomic benefits.

I had to look it up too, but big drawback is ZMK does not yet support macros. So only the Advantage360 supports macros for now, the Advantage360 Professional does not (https://zmk.dev/docs)

As a heavy user of macros, looks like I'd want to avoid the ZMK version then. It's a shame, as Bluetooth could be useful.

The go to for the ErgoMechKeyboards realm seems to be to use ZMK for these sorts of things. Power consumption and customization of certain things is better supported.

Individually programmable key backlights is nice, but imo a gimmick. That being said I never use backlights on a laptop keyboard, or mech keyboard, so I don't know what the use case for wanting ur Q to light up in a colour different to your W key would be.

Also this board is not that expensive.

Underglow of any kind is a gimmick, but backlights, programmable or not, are useful in low-light situations, to let you see where that key that you rarely use actually is.

You generally don't want Q to light up different from W, but you might want to have a low-level green glow by default and slightly brighter colors to distinguish keys around the periphery.

I very much like backlit keys. My Max Keyboard Blackbird is red, which is just right at its dimmest, although when the side panels reset I always turn them back off.

On the Kinesis Freestyle Edge, I actually like the per-key RGB lighting as well. Most of the alphanumeric and punctuation keys are red, the home keys are green, and the rest are blue. I also turn off the backlight for keys that I don't use, like PRTSC. It looks gaudy as hell, but I feel like it makes it easier to find certain keys in the Freestyle's slightly unusual layout, and to come back to home position.

The other thing I like to do with RGB lighting is to make different layouts different colors--QWERTY is all blue to distinguish it from my multi-color Dvorak.

> ZMK instead of adding BT support to QMK? Why?

QMK is licensed under the GPL, which disallows linking with proprietary Bluetooth stacks. That might be one reason.

I don’t plan on the keyboard but I’ll chime in that per key LEDs are a lifesaver when it comes to learning custom layers.

My workmates gaming keyboard led patterns That change with every key press drive me nuts, though.

> ZMK instead of adding BT support to QMK?

speculation, but I'm pretty confident: ZMK is MIT licensed and QMK is GPL

ZMK is built on top of Zephyr while QMK is built on top of ChibiOS - I'm not super familiar with the specifics but it's my understanding that the way ZMK/Zephyr handles bluetooth and matrix scanning is like an order of magnitude more energy efficient.