love the microsoft ergonomic kb, I have the surface grey one as my main kb (I need the full layout for various 3d program shortcuts annoyingly) but it really does feel great to type on despite not being "mechanical"
honestly humans are nowhere near as lossless as you think, look up any study on eye-witness acounts of crimes and you will see how fallible to hallucination the human mind is as well .... at least when it comes to one-shot learning.
I feel from my own experience teaching, that it's repetition and pruning of information that really makes human memory and learning much more effective and not the act of storing the information the first time.
I think duke 3d maps arent strictly laid out on a 2d plane though are they? I know they use some above/below sectors but I"m not sure if those are just portals to other parts of the map (havnt planed as much duke as I have doom)
likely the performance of playing small video elements as part of the UI, oftentimes it's faster to keep a whole uncompressed texture atlas in memory for animations and such.
as someone who sleeps with bose qc35s on I have intermittently also used cheap construction hearing protection and found those to be just as effective (with the difference ben that the passive construction headphones do BETTER but the quality of the sound is less calm if that makes sense, the bose are also slightly more comfortable due to being smaller and having less pressure)
I'm assuming one of the biggest things limiting sound cancelling is processing speed? being able to react to changing waveforms as they arrive at the ears