I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about keycaps, it always seemed like worrying about the paint on a car and ignoring the engine. I'm guessing they had to use the worse keycaps on the "Pro" for backlighting?
Trust me, you can immediately feel the difference and you can see the difference after at most a year. As someone who types 12+ hours every day, yeah, I care. Car paint protects the body, but is otherwise almost exclusively cosmetic. Keycaps however is what you touch. You don't touch a keyboard (in a meaningful way), so I think your analogy is flawed.
