Wouldn't that be "boost in installation SPEED?"

That's plainly racist, therefore Donald Trump's fault!

"not lightning"

Actually, they ARE designed to protect the transceiver parts against lightning... not direct strikes, but the hundreds of volts that can be induced in the cables when the huge currents from nearby* lightning bolts dissipate through the metal beams of a building, or through the ground, or encountered as a power line spike. That's the exact protection designed in with the transformers. Without those, we'd be blasting Ethernet ports all of the time.

*nearby: extremely difficult to pin down due to the large number of variables, but I've seen over two hundred volts at fairly high current (over an amp) induced by ground current from a strike over three hundred feet away.

A few years ago, I helped design and build a production-line test system for RJ-45 jacks, and the test spec required us to "HIPOT" test by applying 2,250 volts to the network connections with the shell grounded, verifying that there was no appreciable current leaked to ground. I assume from your description that you applied a fairly high current across the signal lines, which would certainly burn out the windings on the RJ-45 jack isolation transformer was at the other end of that specific cable. How you got the damage to propagate beyond a single RJ-45 termination is something of a mystery to me.

On reading your post I jumped on eBay and hit [Buy Now] two times to avoid being in the position of *not* being able to get the exact same keyboard I've used for 40+ hours a week for the past fifteen years: The Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro with both USB and (worthless) PS2 connectors. This is a split, ergonomic keyboard, so perhaps too bulky for your preference, but I can't survive much time on a straight plank keyboard: After authoring nearly two million lines of code since starting a software company in 1987, I once nearly lost the use of my hands altogether. It wasn't carpal tunnel, though, it was the less-common ulnar, which becomes inflamed and impinged by working thousands of hours with one's wrists cocked out to align them with the keys on a straight keyboard. The Natural has just enough angle to allow me to maintain a comfortable position while typing. As I have about another ten years of programming to knock out before I retire, on reading your post I decided that $50 worth of expenditure to squirrel away a couple more of the MS Natural Keyboard Pros was cheap insurance. So thanks for the reminder (and sorry if my advice isn't all that helpful for your use cases).