At first I hated Eagle. I remember PCB design from uni as being not so fiddly as I think Eagle was when I first tried it. But it was free, everyone was using it so I held on and after a few designs it started liking it.
The more you use a software the more used to it’s features you get. You learn about new features, shortcuts and benefits. But most of all you learn how to overcome all the quirks. And eagle has lots of them. The more I managed to overcome and bypass the bugs and quirks in Eagle, the more I felt a sense of accomplishment using the software. I realized I never liked Eagle because it was such a great software, I just felt good knowing how to use it. I felt like a pro.
I started having the need to make bigger boards with more than two layers. I tried Kicad and immediately stopped using it because I disliked the workflow. I found a loophole in Eagle which is that you can actually make the board as big as you want, you can only not place any components within the restricted rectangle, so I continued using eagle because that worked fine for the current project.
Then I started as a hardware engineer for a company where I’m the only one who knows electronics and I could choose whatever cad package I wanted. I wanted to standardize on a software that I could use both at home and at work, and continue using even if I quit the company at some point. In other words I would like it free. Kicad v4 had come out in the meanwhile and Chris Gammel had been promoting it somewhat through The Amp Hour and I decided to give it a real go.
To say the least, giving up on Eagle was such a great relief and it still is today. Maintaining old Eagle projects is a pain because all the workarounds which gave me that sense of accomplishment is no longer sitting in my fingertips. Kicad for the most part just works. When you understand the workflow it’s much more intuitive than anything I’ve yet tried.
Summed up I think it was all a matter of letting go of that “I’m an eagle-pro”-feeling and trying something new. Dave Jones says that you must stick with what you’re used to but I don’t agree with him.
I hope Kicad at some point might integrate its several software components more tightly so I can have real-time forward annotation like Eagle. And hopefully standardize on some kind of configurable BOM manager.