The problem is that 1) "design rules" are in practice more like guidelines, and often need to be violated in order to actually get stuff made, and 2) all the da

The problem is that 1) "design rules" are in practice more like guidelines, and often need to be violated in order to actually get stuff made, and 2) all the data is wrong, contradictory, and cannot be trusted. A lot of the work of a hardware engineer is reading and interpreting datasheets and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. The low-hanging fruit which can easily be automated is the easy part of the job, and writing the input data for the automation ends up taking more time than just manually doing it yourself. I have dabbled into writing some software extensions for KiCad, and some turned out to be very useful and now save me quite a lot of time. However, every time I tried to be "clever" and solve a seemingly easy problem, it ended up not being worth it in the end.