Be careful, choc v1 board are almost never compatible with choc v2 switches.

Lily58 or Iris?

Sofle v2 (not the rgb version) has a descent stagger of 1/2u.

In theory yes. In practice, I never had problem hot plugging my trrs on my keyseebee board.

The 8 wires of the RJ45 cable are all used, allowing to have only one MCU. Also, RJ45 cables and connectors are cheap and common.

To manage all these keys with only 8 wires, a special “duplex matrix” is used.

I use almost raw bépo layout, with bépo on the OS.

https://github.com/TeXitoi/keyseebee#whats-the-layout

Modifier are, IMHO, bad on the external pinky column, so using it for low used characters are great.

What I really like with bépo is that punctuation is also optimized.

Don’t forget you can cheap tent any split with some books, sand bags, cardboard, 3D printed parts…

First design was on freecad. The others on openscad.