To me it looks like you’re attacking a piece of stone with a chainsaw, instead of with a mallet and chisel. You will probably get some chips of, but it will be a tedious effort to get to an “acceptable” result.
KiCad has aspirations of becoming a truly professional PCB design program, and it’s getting close, but there are still some “holes” in it. Some (possible) workflows are just not well supported yet. There is rudimentary import of some vector graphics formats, but those are not well suited to be used for the layout of tracks.
The “normal” way of using KiCad, (and therefore the best supported path) is to first make a schematic, and assign footprints in Eeschema, then put the netlist and meta information into Pcbnew, and then place the footprints and lay out the tracks.
One of the strong points of KiCad (euhm any PCB program) is that it is designed around helping with laying tracks on the PCB that need to be made, and prevent tracks from being laid that result in faulty connections, and it has a lot of built-in tools to do that, and more. For example you normally set one (or more) distances in the configuration, and KiCad then automatically ensure that that distance is used as a clearance between tracks from different nets. KiCad also had built in checks to verify that all connections on the PCB match with the schematic.
But to be able to do such things it needs to know some things about your designs. It needs to know what pads are, where your footprints are, and a list of connections of which pads need to be connected to which other pads. And this is information you create when you draw the schematic.
If all you wanted to do is tho create gerber files from a .dxf file, then you could try some of the many programs that pop up with:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=create+gerber+from+dxf
… but in your first post you already wrote you want to make plated through holes, and this already implies you want more.
KiCad is so much build around working with a schematic (and netlist) that even for PCB’s as simple as an adapter board between two connectors it is useful to first make a schematic, and then port the netlist to Pcbnew before making the PCB itself.
There will be some learning curve for you to get used to KiCad, especially because the workflow is very different from drawing some tracks that resemble a PCB in a mechanical CAD program. If you try to use KiCad in the same way as you did your mechanical CAD program, then KiCad will actively fight you and it will be an unpleasant experience. If, however, you decide to first invest some time to learn what KiCad is, and how it works, and then use KiCad as it is intended to be used, then the many build int tools in KiCad will help to to design better PCB’s faster.
It is up to you whether you want to work with KiCad or against it.
All the above advice is pretty generic. If you post a schematic and your .DXF then we have a much better idea of the sort of complexity of the PCB you want to make. For now I’m guessing it’s a pretty simple PCB with maybe up to 20 parts.
If you can write some sort of plug in or modification that expands KiCAD’s usefulness and functionality, then that is most excellent. I’ll see if I can successfully attach the DXF R12 file to this post. If I am able to offer anything else that may help you in your effort, please let me know. Nope, I tried to upload the file, but I get an error saying that new users cannot upload attachments. I will either have to wait out a time limit or reach a post count, or get the file to you some other way.
