https://wooting.store/products/wooti...32123928346735
this is available as a cheaper alternative to the Steelseries, but it's on pre-order til spring/summer next year. knowing Wooting, it's going to be the better board too.
you can check ebay/facebook/reddit marketplace for the Apex Pro, I've seen adds with these new in box with a german layout for ~170 eur where I live, most likely stolen from Germany
about lubing your switches, it's nothing complicated but it's really tedious, prob takes you ~3h if you've never done it before. lube needs to be re-applied once every 2y or so. it makes switches even smoother and quieter, eliminates pinging from the springs and makes the sound a bit deeper. one the big advantages of a hotswap board is being able to easily lube the switches, otherwise you'd have to de-solder each and every one and solder them back on. there are plenty of mods you can do to improve a hotswap that you can't on a regular keyboard, but you have to want to put in the time. there are guides on youtube and there's nothing to really mess up tho. Glorious also sell a 10 eur tub of lube that will last you 4-5 jobs on a full size board, can find it on caseking.
could get a lot of these sick custom boards or even really good pre-builts if you weren't limited to ISO DE layout. most of the world type on US ANSI, the ones with a long left shift and enter keys and those keys aren't interchangeable between the 2 layouts, as the switch locations and enter stab are different.
you're also limited by dedicated media keys and full size factor, but mostly the ISO thing. otherwise you can get a smaller board with UK ISO, w/o the numberpad, buy a separate wireless one, this also allows you to stick it on the left side (which is an advantage imo because you don't have to take your right hand off your mouse to use it), buy some nice german keycaps and program the { } : " keys to input the german characters you need via software.
smth like this, sry about the dust xD