I had a thought today.
I took a button apart and there are four pieces. Two of them are the spring and the lock nut. For lack of better, more accurate words, I'll call the other two pieces the "housing" and the "plunger". The plunger is the piece of the button that moves when you press it, and the microswitch and nut attach to the housing.
My thought was this. Wouldn't it be easier to get an injection mold company to make duplicates of just the plungers? After all, most of the housing is below the surface of the panel. That way, there would be just one simple piece to reproduce.
The downside is that the ring of plastic surrounding the plunger would still be visible. It would be okay if it was black or roughly the same color as the plunger, but we wouldn't want a mishmash of colors.
This also lends itself well to people wanting to retrofit their panels with lit buttons without the cost of all new buttons.
There is an injection molding company,
Globecorp, just a few miles from my house. I wonder if they would do just the plungers and what they would charge for a small run of a few thousand.