I don't believe there are visa requirements between EU countries, you might want to fix that (maybe skip the EU countries for EU citizen, or give 100%?)
I used to think like you until I met a coworker. He could not code to save his life, nobody in the team liked working with him. Until one day we had a boring data entry task. He could do it for hours at a time, and barely made any mistake. This experience taught me something.
There is no need to spend time on the hardware either, but OP wanted to learn something.
For those who might be interested here is my firmware project: https://github.com/marcv81/umk. I like to think it's more approachable than QMK, at the cost of features.
"That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal."
I don't feel this is a valid argument. We only really know how pain feels to us, but we can guess it also applies to other humans, animals, etc. That we cannot imagine how it feels to respond to negative stimuli as a plant should not invalidate the possibility that it is unpleasant.
Most manholes are round because that is the most practical shape such that the cover cannot fall in. There are actually other shapes, but they are usually hinged and most costly.