KiCad: A commitment to freedom

But it is in a steady improvement route, while operating in a much harder segment to attract the resources they need than most free/open-source projects: their best users aren't high-level programmers, neither UX experts, and UX experts and high-level programmers aren't their typical users[1].

I still use Altium for my most complex designs, even for reasons beyong those you've posted, but it surely can be used for professional projects beyond the simplest ones, even taking advantage of the automation by learning a few simple patterns.

[1] Except, of course, by coincidence. As a primarily hardware engineer, I'm trying to help by re-learning desktop programming, something I haven't done in years.

That's a good comment. There are two basic classes of UI problems with KiCAD. First, there are the ones that are just classic menu-and-button bad design. The schematic library and footprint library editors have a confusing set of menus and buttons to do what's really a simple open/close/new/save task. There are lots of discussions on forums about this. Those need a rethink of the library UI, a clear design document, and a modest amount of implementation. If that got fixed, the initial KiCAD complaint level would go way down.

The second set of problems is harder. They're in the programs for graphical design. There are four of those - schematic drawing, schematic symbol design, board layout, and board footprint design. Schematic drawing isn't too bad. It has some strange bugs - there's a convention in schematics that you put a dot where wires connect at a 3 or 4 way connection. (Wires which just cross don't connect.) Most schematic drawing programs handle this automatically. KiCAD almost does, but it's possible for a connection dot to become detached from wires, or for wires to connect without a connection dot. This might result in a bad netlist, which matters. A few bug fixes there would be enough to fix up that part of the system.

The schematic symbol and board footprint editors are just really clunky draw programs. They work, but lack basic features such as grouping and cut and paste. Those wouldn't be that hard to fix. Fixing that, plus the library editor UI, would help the project a lot, because KiCAD needs a bigger symbol and footprint library, and you want users to contribute those. Frustrating contributors hurts the project.

The actual board layout program is the hardest problem. Others have written about this. There are some very strange features. There are three graphics modes (classic, OpenGL, and something else). Menu items which have nothing to do with display, such as component auto-placement, change with the mode. You can't automatically spread out components in OpenGL mode. The menu item just isn't there. (Not even greyed out, just gone.) There are also some functions hidden in dialogs under menus which ought to be more visible.

The "Help" menu item just loads a PDF of the tutorial, which isn't too useful.

All this stuff is fixable, but probably not via "hackathons". A UI design document is needed. That's always useful; when the UI design document has to explain some badly designed feature at great length, it's clear there's a problem. Write down exactly how all the schematic symbol and footprint library update functions work, and the mess will be revealed.

We MUST be able to license the project for commercial parties to produce them, lest we have to support the project for its entire life-cycle, which can be decades. Also, a non-commercial license restrict sharing between labs, or even use for some entities that work as government contractors.