I'm in the same boat. All of my stabs into the ECAD tools have just felt like trips into dark rooms with lots of pointy shelves at different heights to bonk my

I'm in the same boat. All of my stabs into the ECAD tools have just felt like trips into dark rooms with lots of pointy shelves at different heights to bonk my head into. None of them have been satisfactory experiences. I, too, have made progress on my own tool. Mostly focusing on just laying out Gerber files. I haven't made the progress you have made, but the idea that the tools trouble me enough to abandon them and just start from scratch, is interesting. What's worse, is that having dabbled with both KiCad and Eagle (and probably others) and neither rises up above to a level that I was having any real success. They both look like they were cut from the same cloth, no doubt designed in the 80's and just working on "workflow momentum" of the industry, because they don't want to retrain anyone that's been doing this for 30 years.