> In any case, XKB, painful though it is, is _the_ keyboard mapping for X11, and that's never going to change. Not least because it's exposed at all levels through the totally immutable Xlib ABI.
For my purposes XKB is not particularly painful - dealing with Windows oddities is much worse. The only reason that XKB-less methods interest me is for dealing with servers which don't have it. Not sure how many that is these days, but I am sure that some VNC-like servers will fall into that category - and tend to be rather interesting from a keyboard handling point of view.