I built my first planck by soldering each keyswitch. That's no longer required. My latest preonic I bought fully-assembled and it works great.
It still baffles me that the standard layout isn't ortholinear after all these years. There's no reason for staggered rows other than path dependence. But when you have billions of people relying on years of muscle memory on the same layout, it's just not a tradeoff most people are willing to make.
Unfortunately seems to have entirely disappeared from their website despite being a really lovely product that I've daily driven for years. If anyone finds a replacement I could recommend to friends I'd love to know about it.
I use the Preonic as my daily driver and really like it - minimal but not too much so. I tried the Atreus like the idea but it was a touch too minimal for my taste - certain key combinations I used a lot at work were too much of a finger twister!