I do understand where you are coming from, but it sounds like a lot of this reasoning is based on pre-padstack layouts. Concepts from that regime no longer apply universally to the current capabilities. For example:
“I can’t drop a via here and run my tracks under there coz that’s obviously a TH pad/hole”.
You can run a track like this, between two layers of a padstack with non-uniform pad shapes, so gold is not a reliable indicator of non-routability in the general case:
The PTH hole wall and through hole itself are the real sign of “you can’t route though here, it’s fresh air”.
Possibly a feature request here is “PTHs could have a dedicated fill colour, like NPTHs do” (not promising it will be accepted, but it’s a fair request), if you think just the black fill and gold wall is too discreet.
it’s gonna be hand soldered rather than re-flowed SMD reflowed”.
It gives a better visual representation of the actual board with having to 3D view.
Both of these are, IMO, a conflation of what was the gold colour and what has always been in reality un-pasted exposed copper. It’s often true, but not always. For example, pin-in-paste/hybrid pads are THT but are reflowed. And you can have SMD pads that are hand-soldered, and you may not be hand-soldering the board at all.
There are also dedicated tools to formally help you keep more clear of certain pads, for example pad clearance overrides, keepouts, and even custom DRC rules.
Having some better way to highlight paste and un-pasted, un-masked, outer-layer copper does seem like an entirely valid feature request. For my own part, I often find the paste layer to be a little too discreet and easily hidden under other layers.
what is on the other side, is there anything…oh yes, that’s a TH pad/hole footprint
That also depends on your padstack. Nothing forces the back pad to be the same as the front.
A valid feature request here might be: I want to see a “xray vision” of other layers’ pad shape boundaries even when normally rendered under the current focussed layer, so that I can visualise the pad stack better.
E.g. reducing pad opacity is a bit “muddy”, even with only 4 layers:
And maybe something (programmer art alert, this is a quick mockup with no statement of “I think this is a good implementation” attached) like this may be a helpful mode:
I believe for newbies to KiCad Pcb layout the old appearance is more intuitive.
I would contend that it’s more likely to tempt them into long-term wrong assumptions about what is going on for that pad with respect to various layer geometry and paste/mask settings. People have been making that mistake for a very long time.
How do other EDA’s handle this issue…or don’t they?
EDAs that support padstacks do what KiCad now does (at least Altium and Allegro do). EDAs that don’t support padstacks can naturally get away with simpler implementations.
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If nothing else, pls incorporate HoleWallPaintingMultiplier=** etc into the GUI somehow without having to rely on backend hacks.
That is an actionable, self-contained idea that can be raised on Gitlab as a feature request. I can’t promise that it would be accepted by the team, or implemented in exactly that way (maybe we just need to tweak the default more carefully, for example), but at least it can be discussed on its own terms.
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