I have made no ROM changes in almost a year and started having the same keyboard issue. It was driving me crazy and typing with the stylus sucks. My warranty was almost up so I went and got my phone replaced yesterday and I am sooooo happy to have my keyboard back! I didn't even realize just how much I missed it until I whipped off a text message in 2 seconds
Now it's time to do some digging and see what kind of progress has happened with the ROMs these days. I was using WM5 cause it worked the best when I did my testing a year ago.