I Want a Better Keyboard

I'm someone else for whom the the CODE keyboard doesn't approach anything like an improvement over the status quo ante. For me, start with a Kinesis -- the layout is what I'm used to after a decade, and the hand position is the best I've ever tried -- built in a hardwood case custom sized to my (large) hands. I'm sick like unto death of ugly plastic crap; even as I've been using my Kinesis for a decade, it looks disposable and junky.

I want backlit keycaps. I want it to be 100% re-mappable on the keyboard itself, and I want a bunch of "blank" keys for extra modifiers (super/hyper) and macros. I haven't figured out where to put them on the modified Kinesis layout, but there's space in there, particularly if I can replace the useless PgUp/Down et al with something I actually use.

I don't particularly care about the keyswitches, but because I want to have a single keyboard for the duration, I'll need to be able to replace them as they fail. So let's make that nice and simple.

Connecting to the host should be simple, so a single cable would be good. Of course, I hate USB, and the HID in particular, so we'll need a better connector and a less warty driver interface.

And of course, there won't even be a caps-lock key. Attempting to add this feature will cause the keyboard to explode.