Yes, doing the actual keyboard to MIDI assignments is 100% PITA.
But unfortunately it’s the only way to use a secondary standard and cheap keyboard completely independently from your primary, as Windows by design can not distinguish between one keyboard and another. And there may be cases where you’d love to have a secondary keyboard (e.g. a small wireless Logitech or a Rii Mini or small programmable keyboards of just 5-10 buttons, such are the ones here).
The tutorial may look intimidating at first, but in reality I’ve tried to write it as simple as possible so it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to set up. What will take much more time is to bind keyboard presses to MIDI notes via UCR tool and then assign those MIDI commands to actual MSFS simconnect events/LVARs via SPAD.next.
The latter advertises that it can use direct keyboard keypresses to control events/variables and it’s a useful function, but of little use once those keypresses conflict with other things you may be doing with any of your keyboards (like typing in the EFB). Unless you use some sort of trigger, like set up a local variable which you somehow alternate between true/false and depending on its value you toggle your keyboard input to SPAD. However using MIDI commands instead of direct keyboard presses in SPAD.next circumvents all these limitations.
Once you have set everything up using the above tutorials, then you just forget about it and you can keep using it for years. The alternative is to get specialized flight controllers or devices like Elgato Stream Deck which do NOT work as plain keyboards but obviously they’re much more expensive.