wow - time flies.

I've been using PADS for 22 years also.  Plenty of calls back and forth to the PADS developers in those days, we all kind of helped them develop.  Then the excitement of PADS for Windows 3.1!  No need to type DOS commands!

Prior to PADS, I used Mentor Boardstation, Applicon., Tape

Being captive, my designs aren't as broad ranging as Tom's.  But similarly, I have yet to find a limit.  When I do autoroute, I tend to do it in pieces, so I really appreciate the routing and autorouting tools.  The ability to customize with Visual Basic helps a ton, I use it to integrate with Excel, PDM & AML database, Solidworks tools.  (Of course, our PDM database just went to an iExplore interface, the VB interface is now trashed)

I use IDF exports to Solidworks for 3D modeling, all of our boards get modeled.  Pretty seamless.

I think any survey might need to be divided into 2 segments.  With so many EEs doing board design by default, they are going to be weighted towards ease of use.  True PCB designers would weight towards features, DFM, DFT, high level routing tools.

Pete

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