You could have done far worse with both. Pilor and Pentel are great. You could have bought Visconti limited edition which fail to work out of the factory, horror of horrors. Pilot is reliable little worker and won't fail you. Great bang for buck.
True! In fact the Pentel pencil saw me through both undergrad and grad school (in math, so quite a lot of hand-writing of stuff). It's basically family now.
Indeed. I got my brother both of those, although I got Pilot MR Gold, not retro. But still. Great pens. Work reliably for awesome price. Fountain pen is a bit of a nail for my liking (Pelikan user here)... but you can't argue quality and reliability. Only character.
You're not wrong. It's what started me on the mech kb journey so long ago. I wish I remembered what pen it was, but it was my teacher's and had a very satisfying click to it. He said that it was the same click as the old mainframe keebs that he used to work on. I was young, and had no idea what he was talking about, but a keyboard can sound and feel that good? I had to know! Fast forward to today, that dragon has not yet been reached, but the chase continues on both fronts (pen and kb).