I hope it’s here to stay given that Drop has been pretty consistent with stock for the MT3 product line.
MT3 Serika is definitely my favorite and I feel kind of silly stocking up on used sets now, lol. Here’s another chance to pick them up at a far more reasonable price!
The biggest change for me is the R5 bottom row, instead of the R4 originally. Huge improvement in comfort IMO.
You know, I completely missed that R5 was a departure from the old sets! Good catch! Reading over the Drop page, it doesn’t seem like they mention that fact either. I think I was too excited to see it was available and immediately focused on which kits I wanted to buy.
MT3 Susuwatari with the standard MT3 bottom row:
versus MT3 Serika R2 bottom row:
I don’t understand the ergonomics of flat bottom row. At first it’s like… oh yeah that would be nice. But then, if that’s nice, why would any row have a sculpt? The original bottom row makes more sense.
For me, 95% of the time I use the bottom row on both my Planck and 65%, I’m using my thumbs or I have my hands completely off the home row (for example, pressing Win+Shift+S to take a screenshot). I could see this new bottom row layout being more comfortable in those situations as opposed to the original MT3 bottom row sculpt.
I think the new angle makes sense for fingers/thumbs that are approaching that bottom row from that direction, rather than R4 where your fingers are approaching those keys from the home row.
I flip my spacebars - it’s far more comfortable for my thumbs given the angle that I typically reach for the spacebar. I don’t think I’m the only one either. With R5, I don’t have to flip it to be comfortable, and I don’t have this awkward looking bottom row, lol.
Same. In particular, I found the 2U concave MT3 spacebars in the ortho sets to be uncomfortable in their standard orientation.
All about that flipped spacebar 
It will take more than a flat bottom row to make PBT MT3 enjoyable to type on.
In general, despite looking nasty, a flat bottom row is OKish feeling. Except for the arrow keys (where I’m not using my thumbs). Looking at the picture @ListlessLlama posted, I don’t imagine I’d enjoy the angle between the up & down arrow.
It’s a shame they don’t do an extra R5 UP key, especially with the perverse popularity of 96% keebs. At least the Geometries and Novelties set has this.
Edit: I missed the extra R2 up key. Very nice.
I’m bummed they aren’t including the black space bar option this round. That was the one thing I missed on r1.
I think I’ve spent more time evaluating row layouts on this set than any set since I first got into MKs at this point, but I found this to be kind of interesting: the base/core set includes a R2 “up” arrow key. I think the new MT3 R5 is just MT3 R2:
If you look at this picture from Drop, you can see the “up” arrow is the same orientation as the new bottom row:
Oh nice! I completely missed it up there.
Until you mentioned the up arrow angle, I hadn’t even thought about it. I did spend a few minutes staring with a bit of confusion at the up arrow in R2 for the Geometries & Novelties kit. I just could not figure out which layout/user/weirdo would place an up arrow so far from the down arrow. lol
R5 is flat and not new, and R2 is not R5 (rather, R2 is R3 upside down). An Up key that’s angled towards the bottom rather than away from it is a stylistic choice.
Huh. Learned something new today. The layout images for Serika R2 don’t do a very good job explaining what you’re getting in the set. I’m surprised Drop didn’t use the set list format used for MT3 /dev/tty:
Edit: though the /dev/tty images don’t include widths on most modifiers, so you’re left to guess mod widths in many cases…
glad to see this is getting an R2!
Eaven in Round 1 of Serika u got two different row for the UP-arrow.
The Row2 UP gives you a “U bent scoop” between the up&down which is nice to use but u also get correct row to make it look nice.
Edit: and the all row 5 is good for ortholinear users.
I just rotated an OG /dev/tty set onto my keyboard, and I realize that even the original MT3 set included the (completely flat) R5 bottom row as well as the R4 bottom row, and the R2,R5 arrows as well as the R4 arrows.
/dev/tty included both bottom row profiles to figure out what people wanted
