There's a whole hobby called model building, building a mechanical keyboard is more like building a model than you appear to think. That's why.

Why do you go on the internet and ask aggressive questions predicated on a wrong premise? Just out of curiousity.

There is no aggeessivity in my question.

I assembled many model kits and it never occurred to call myself a builder. Model kit builder concieve the kits and or create parts out of raw material, epoxy putty and/or 3d printing.

Similarly a bicycle builder will solder/bond individual tubes to build custom frame and fork, possibly custom stem and/or racks. A brand that source frame builts in Asia will but mount the ready made part will say "assembled in <insert the country>.

Maybe I am picky with semantics but it strikes me as arrangant to call ourself builders when we just pick up and assemble parts.

Serious question: is English your first language?

There's no ambiguity here, the hobby is called model building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_building

But they selecting the individual components, buying them from different vendors, then assembling them to the final thing.

You can "build" a PC or a bicycle without creating any custom part, but the end result will be unique. A keyboard has less parts(board, switches, keycaps and maybe a controller) but I think it still count as built.

If you order everything as part of one kit, like the furniture from Ikea, then yes, you just assembling it together.

For what it's worth, I feel the same way you do and very carefully chose the word "assembling" instead of "building" when I blogged about putting my keyboard together.

You can "Build" a car from a kit, and nobody would take issue. I do plenty of soldering, I've cut case plates by hand, and spent far too many hours on this. Building anything is merely assembling it, the only difference is component count. I guess nobody "builds" PCs, either.

A lot of the time, the "build" involves soldering. I don't talk about having "built" my keyboards because I got boards with pre-soldered hotswap sockets -- but even in defense of that, "building a PC" is just assembling 99% of the time, too.