I also have 2 Brown Brothers paddles, 1 I bought and the other was given to me, I have them put aside, I doubt I'll use them again but they have memories, same with the straight key I use, it's a Ham Key, heavy metal base and the rest is solid heavy plastic, I won it as a door prize from a club that is mostly VHF repeaters, when they showed it for the drawing everyone got a big laugh, when I won it the guy doing the drawing commented "it figures, a CW operator won it", I also have a brand new WWII J-38 key, it's part of a wire communications kit. I've never been able to properly set up my Vibroplex bug but I saw their display at a Ham Fest and every key was perfectly set up, myself I use a Vibroplex Iambic paddle with a WinKeyer USB, I do a lot of contesting and N!MM has the interface for it, at 70 years old the arthritis in my hands and arms is starting to get worse. If you can't send properly with a cheap J-38 key, or something like it, what makes anyone thing that a $500 key will do any better? When I went for Radioman 2nd class the requirement was sending and receiving, The first thing the RMC had us do was the sending test, 20 wpm, we were young, thought we were real hot shots, the receiving portion of the test was copying what we sent, Chief taped us!, what an eye opener, his comment was "if you can't copy your own fist how do you expect anyone else to?"
They were the J-38 keys and they were all beat up, miss adjusted, you name it but we had to learn to make do with what we had, the thing we had to learn first was how to properly send code.
Don't just look at keys from the amateur side of the house, the military used a ton of them, I went through Radioman A school in 65-66, we had about 80 people in the class, every day we used the keys as part of the training, add to that every radio room had a least one key, be it aircraft, ship or shore station.
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