I hope people will take this in the spirit it is offered, this is my perspective as a relativly new user.
kicad is a very very difficult application to master, it does a bunch of things that very opaque. The main one is symbol, footprint and model management. The decision to handle these as separate entities makes managing components in kicad really hard. i seem to spend most of my time trying to locate and piece together component symbols and footprints, the whole 3D rendering side from models appears to be a total waste of time as 90% of the models are not available.
It makes no sense to me to handle symbols and footprints seperatly, in fact doing so seems to have spawned a large number of incomplete component definitions as people hack their own implementations into private projects.
Would it not be a good idea for the kicad project to sponsor a centralized model repository for symbols and footprints that can be run like a wikipedia model, with a direct search API for integration to kicad. i know that people like snap-eda do something like that but even thier implementation is spotty and incomplete. Naming conventions are all over the place, the github approach with separate files means there is no available searchable metadata.
by having an accessible central repository that has moderation and standards enforcement, possibly sponsored by folks like snap-eda etc, would ensure that there is a one stop shop for everything. One can even support click through bom buying from the large vendors to encourage them to participate.
I work on parts exchanges for aviation and automotive, so i know how much of a difference it can make.
one final issue, the current model integrates pin-outs and footprints too closely, what is needed is a separation so that pin-outs for common chips can be mapped to common encapsulations. like DIP14 or SOT5, and they should be the third layout type. that would go a long way towards the standardization, the current scheme seems to be find a footprint etc that is close and edit it, but component footprints are largely standard across a large number of parts, i know this sounds like arguing for separation after arguing for integration, but this would be a key part of an online reference exchange, standard part mechanical data and footprints not tied to device pin-outs. It would also help to alleviate the 3D model scarcity if models where attached to a “encapsulation” type.
I want to stop having to spend hours of wasted time trying to find obscure components to use them in kicad