This is all great info and advice. I just wanted to add some extra info from the perspective of an EE that works for industry (well past the point where advice

This is all great info and advice. I just wanted to add some extra info from the perspective of an EE that works for industry (well past the point where advice 1-3 are relevant) 1) this is generally true, except if you're working on something like power electronics (and not just taking a design straight from TI or something) or on a complex mixed mode board, you can spend far more time in simulation, prototyping, and characterization of parts than in datasheets because, as you said in point 2, they lie. I've been in situations where I spent 4 weeks on research and design, only to spend 8 weeks teasing out the differences between three vendors' high power transistors across a dozen batches to figure out how variations in manufacturing changed the efficiency of an inverter. 3) this changes drastically with more complex boards. If you're making an ARM mobo, for example, you can have hundreds of parts most of which are the same (capacitors, resistors, etc). Choosing the processor and peripheral chips takes a lot less time than schematic capture and PCB design, especially if you have experience using the parts. You WILL spend way more time dealing with drivers and firmware though. I need two hands to count the number of times I've had to rewrite vendor provided firmware like standard USB or ethernet implementations because silicon companies are, most ironically, incompetent at software. 4) The more you work in EE the more this changes. A dozen EEs and I share all of our Altium footprints and we spend less than a day on footprints for a month long project, most of which is spent checking the important footprints against the datasheets before sending off to fab. 5) the ONLY time I have seen an auto router do good work (having used Electra, Specctra, cadence, and altium) is on 20+ layer PCBs like Intel motherboards. In this case, there were about 15 EEs, 5 of whom worked almost exclusively on configuring the autorouter and simulating the results. If you're starting out in PCB design, at best you'll get a few traces properly routed (probably in the wrong order) and at worst, it'll be like Jackson Pollock vomiting a bunch of virtual copper. 6) Unless you're high volume, it's almost always better to just increase the number of layers. The sunk costs for finishing a working PCB design are huge but manufacturing can be very flexible and inexpensive if you're willing to wait.