thanks man, yeah i am actually not too happy about the inner break rings for the encoder shafts. it was meant so that both bourns PEC11 and PEC16 fit, but different from the prototype the manufacturer wasn't able to stick to the thinness of the original design. so PEC16 migght actually sit a little loose right now if you break the ring.the break pads between the board segments shouldnt be an issue, if you use a small saw.
on brightness, you'll have a hard time squeezing resistors between those 2020 SMD pads. but these are WS2812 LEDs which are easily adressable per SPI, meaningg you can set a different colour for each on the software side. The overall brightness on my demos is at 20 out of 255, these are super bright. and then you can dim individual LEDs through the color code, eg. where red is 255,0,0 you can get dim red with 127,0,0 etc.
so, no need for resistors