That was the impression I got reading some comments people made online and doing research, so I focused on tkinter. As I mentioned in the 4th sentence of the post you quoted I discovered that was not the case, but by then I had already done some work on the tkinter script so I kept with it.
Before I actually tried any of this and was just thinking of it conceptually I bought the Kade device. It was my hope that it would save on soldering, something I hate so very, very much, and I had not started learning Python at that point. It never occurred to me something so simple as keystrokes would not be present in Python, a language rated as being terrific by everyone I know who knows it. Out of great ignorance I thought I could hook up the Kade device and do something like if keypress == r then do this. Also out of ignorance I thought that using the GPIO would require days of soldering and incredibly complicated coding to talk to the pins. Only since I got much more deep into actually doing this did I start to find out otherwise. Spent the last few days looking at breakout boards to see if they would make the wiring easier to test out. When I saw one that had built in electrical protection (RaspIO Pro) I thought about getting it and going the route you suggest. However, I cannot find any option that does not require a breadboard. The lack of compactness and all the exposed wires does bother me a bit. More than it should, but I need a compact setup I can place outdoors. Breadboards and loose wires worry me in this case. Still, I must admit I spent the last 3 or 4 days thinking about exactly what you said and I may do it that way after all just to get it to work software wise. And BTW, I am not using any GPIO for the lights, the LED light strip is hooked up to a Blinkstick Pro through a USB port. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
