Before subscription, you used to get the bi-annual file format change, which meant that you could not share with old license holders.
People will work on what they want to, everyone is a volunteer not a company employee. Everyone is free to spend their personal free time on what they want.
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Indeed. As for the teardrops, despite designing hundreds of sometimes very complex PCBs in my life, I never needed them. On the contrary, I find the circuit simulator quite useful 
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Also: teardrops can be implemented as a Python plugin (and has been) – this doesn’t mean we should not have it part of core KiCad, but it does mean that we should maybe prioritize things (like the simulator) which can’t be implemented as plugins.
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AFAIR teardrops are planned for the future KiCad, as one of the features targeting rigid/flex designs. For regular PCBs, they’re mostly aesthetics. I do simulate them locally with zones, if I need to.
Are you sure tear drops are one of the most used features? It has been ages since i have seen a PCB with teardrops as the issue they solve is not really there anymore in modern production (where alignment tolerances between copper and drills is rather tight).
The only places where i can imagine them being of use today is in high frequency designs or flexible boards. Both of these don’t have a market share to say this missing feature would be an issue for the majority of users.
However simulation is definitely a requirement for Commercial users. The users there need to proof to either their boss or even their customer that there is a low enough risk for failure to make the Investment of a production run worth it. Part of that can be done with simulation which can potentially reduce the number of prototype boards needed (as some iterations can be done with simulation). Meaning proper simulation support (potentially even with extracted board characteristics) can reduce time to market and of course the general development costs. And yes the current simulation support of kicad is not quite there to fulfill these requirements. But it is at least a first step.
Teardrops are also useful for thin tracks (such as 6mil) connected to THT connectors. Just think PC104 here. Mating and un-mating such connectors can put enough stress in the PCB for thin tracks to the THT holes to break, and Teardrops prevent this because they distribute the stress on the track.
Here a screenshot of the A64-Olinuxino in which fat tracks ends are used to approximate teardrops for this reason:
A little search:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pcb+teardrop&t=hd&va=u&ia=web
confirms reports of teardrops being used to prevent mechanical stress points on tracks, and not only for “assumed RF properties” and “drill tolerance”.
Teardrop enhances PCB structural integrity in presence of thermal or mechanical stresses where the trace joints the pad resulting in less hairline cracks in traces. Teardrop enlarges the PCB tolerance of the drill to pad and could reduce the PCB cost of complex boards. Teardrop can reduce risk of PCB cracking and improve yield.
And about the drill tolerance… Tolerances get smaller, but via’s also get smaller, so teardrops still enable thighter desing rules for a certain drill accuracy.
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plus they look good .
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I’m not pushing either way, it is a developers call,
but: maybe you would see more use of them in Kicad if they existed.
Just make the trace segment going to the connector pins thicker than the rest of the trace. It’s literally the same thing.
In my experience Tear drops are very useful tool, when using component like TO-220 (and many similar one with thick pins) track joints will cut during manual soldering and assembly into enclosure (people sometime bend those component),. thick pin joints will become stress point due to vibrations and track joint will cut …tear drops will solve this problem …there are many simple workaround for that in kicad…im not telling this only one feature…
adding simulation is good and future proof
I’m already using the Python tear drop plugin.
Pyhon teardrop plugin is not still available for v6 nightlies 
Could someone enlighten me about kicad simulator: how it compares to ADI LTspice? It is also a free tool, with old history. I have never tried kicad simulator only because I presume it is ind of in an infant state, and ADI offers a free tool which is reliable. But I hate odd user interface and schematic entry way of LTspice… is it worth trying kicad simulator?
ngspice solves the same kind of problems as LTspice and other commercial SPICE simulators. The commercial simulators (at present) have more features, whether or not those features are important to you, I can’t say.
The other thing is that the commercial SPICE simulators often support some kind of encrypted / obfuscated device models that are specific to that vendor, and then the vendor does not provide plain SPICE models that can work on any simulator. So, for simulating certain devices, you are stuck with the simulator from the vendor that provides the models.
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How do you check your work with a tool you can’t check? Rhetorical. 
Reminds me of Dr. Nicely ( Pentium FDIV bug fame ) remarking on how few people seemed to be checking their work.
I dowloaded it. The UI looks way more polished on the first look than the previous CircuitMaker, but I don’t think it is the announced CircuitMaker Pro (perhaps, they will share more parts of the codebase than previous Altium products). After clicking a bit around I already found the first bug: the mouse-pointer vanishes completly and you have to guess where it is all the time, so it is barely usable right now 
I think I will check if the file format has changed in the next days and update KiCad if required 
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I can’t forgive Altium (then known as Protel) for buying Microcode then killing Circuitmaker 2000 for exactly the same reason.
If it had 20 more years of development, it could have been quite a product.
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By default, all schematics and PCBs are uploaded to the server and can be viewed by other users as soon as they are committed through the internal svn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion) engine.
This would be a deal breaker for many commercial users, myself included.
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