With the recent changes to grid management came this change:
Also simplifies the dialog by removing the user grid (now that you
can add as many user grids as you want).
This does mean that you can no longer have an asymmetric grid, but
it gets too complex if we allow everything for everyone.
Formerly asymmetric grid could be used for placing items with certain x and y “pitch”. This is not possible anymore, and there’s no other way to achieve the same.
What do you think?
It wasn’t a feature I used a lot, but it was nice to have when I needed it (in the footprint editor exclusively, as far as I can remember).
Manually entering coordinates, move exactly, grid origin manipulation, array tool, python scripting, probably others I’m not thinking of at the moment 
… calculating coordinates with pen and paper. Obviously I meant an easy and quick way.
This duplicates or creates new items, doesn’t let you put e.g. existing footprints into an array formation.
I was being a bit facetious, but I think any of those tools can be good enough in various situations. There’s no one-size-fits-all, even when we had the non-square grids in the mix. As for the array tool, that’s fair - I was mostly thinking about pad placement in the footprint editor, which was a good chunk of my usage.
I’m sure I will miss the asymmetric grids from time to time. However I’m also sure I will benefit from the per-item-type grids that were added at the same time, and I suspect I’ll use those much more frequently than I used the asymmetric grids. So I’m taking the good with the bad
There are a few cases where an asymmetrical grid can be useful. For example with a big relay board such as used to be used in telephone switching units, or for automated testing matrices, in such cases you could put the relays on for example 4 grid points in X direction and 7 grid points in Y direction but this feels like a clumsy and ugly to me. ( So I agree with hmk’s and Toyan’s posts below, although it has never been an issue for me personally, but I don’t do very complicated PCB’s either).
One thing I’m still missing in arrays, is that it creates new footprints instead of placing existing footprints on those locations. I never figured out how to work effectively with arrays, but I also never needed them.
Simplification might be a thing when you do software for average general users of computers who are not professionals, trained or experienced.
But in specialized software - which I would say KiCad is - it is often less important than having a full feature set and giving the user all the options needed and then some…
I think giving up the possibility of having asymmetric grid for simplification is not the best way to go in this case.
I definitely used asymmetric grids in the past but I can’t quite remember for what so it probably wasn’t that important.
However I still would count this as a regression of KiCads features and the explanation doesn’t really convince me. I understand you want to keep it simple for the beginners but this doesn’t prevent to have a setting somewhere to allow these more complex features.
@eelik Can you post a few screenshots of the new menu?
It does seem a bit silly to remove this functionality, just to save some entry boxes and a few variables. It would not matter much for the math, because that has to be done anyway,
is there a list or solutions that will be included in 8? or maybe not, but 7 is not bad))) about half a year, it takes about half a year for each new release to become usable when switching to a new branch …
There are some screenshots in comments here PCB: start of grid overrides (d9c2e0ab) · Commits · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab
(Scroll alllllll the way down)
See also
We’ll have something back in place for separate X/Y grids for v8. Probably just make all grids able to be separate X/Y (at least in the PCB/footprint editors) so you can have as many as you want.
Separate X/Y grids are back.
I’ve used this frequently when designing footprints. Think of a simple D-SUB connector, the pins have different x and y spacing. Can’t believe that anyone removes this feature to simplify dialogs. 
Relax, he said they are back. I’ll check this out and confirm in a moment.
EDIT: yes, I just had to add a new grid to the list:
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