I've had a mechanical keyboard for a couple months now and I'm beginning to think the mechanical keyboard community is on to something. I don't think I'm going to get into mechanical keyboards as a hobby - it seems expensive, and I'm not that kind of tinkerer - but I am beginning to get it, I think.
See, the hobby seems quite impenetrable from the outside: you can't wirelessly transmit the experience of actually using a mechanical keyboard, so the reddit and discussion boards and so on have to resort to jargon and keyboard glamour photos. So you get this impression that it's all about the aesthetic qualities of keyboards and niche nerd stuff that's hard to care about without a prior investment. And it's not not about that, but at least to me, what it's really about is that mechanical keyboards are computer peripherals that are toys.
I don't mean that in the disparaging, "tools not toys" sort of way. A mechanical keyboard is a tool but it is a tool that is designed as a toy. To me, just having this thing on my desk, it is a kind of fidget toy to me. I like the way it feels to press the keys, the different sounds from all of them, the feeling of rolling my claws over a set of letters, or hitting a bunch at the same time with a text field open and seeing them all dilligently appear thanks to N-key rollover.
Outside of mechanical keyboards, computer peripherals broadly come off as very utilitarian to me. Your two options are office stuff, all extra buttons for productivity and better ergonomics for long work sessions, and gamer stuff, with faster polling times so your mouse movements come in as early as possible in the frame, or whatever. Either way, they're both very concerned about "performance". It's not that these qualities aren't desirable! It's nice to have things that work well; I originally bought my keyboard to play the whole-keyboard rhythm game Projekt Godhand, because you need N-key rollover for that, and then that feature happens to also make it better as a toy.
Mechanical keyboards just seem to treat these features as a baseline: something like, "if we're going to be keyboard enthusiasts, our keyboards should be, at minimum, better than all other keyboards". That then frees them to worry about other, less practical concerns, to value more than having a device that merely translates your thoughts into your computer, with no exertion and no delay. What I want, and what I think mechanical keyboards represent, is tactility; to care about the actual, physical experience, the feeling, of using the device. So much of that mechanical keyboard technical jargon just describes the way different kinds of key switch physically feel to press! "Tactile" even has its own meaning in the jargon as a specific category of switch that feels a certain way, but I mean to use the term more generically (or possibly as an oblique reference to celsient's essay on "tactilism", which all this reminds me of).
I have written before about how I like rhythm and typing games because they are games about the physical world, about your body and the interface between it and the machine. And I love playing these on this new keyboard because they draw attention in that way to this device that just feels nice to use. I like computers, but I also like tactile objects and existing in the world, and I think mechanical keyboard fans really get that. At least, that's the impression that I get.
...the gamers, at least, have the right idea with RGB lighting, often garish though it is.