They should have never had to ship replacement keyboards at all. I had the same laptop, and the keyboard it shipped with was horribly unusable. For many keys you could only expect it to register a keypress around 80% of the time. This wasn't a case of fixing a damaged part, this was a case of shockingly bad design and QA followed by ignoring customers for months. OP had every right to be annoyed that they made him install his own keyboard. System76 absolutely should have paid to have its defective product fully repaired if that's what the customer desired.