[joshvm]

There's an ongoing debate over whether to go the Kicad approach with a unified footprint library or Eagle where every part has its own footprint/symbol pair.

The Kicad approach makes it easy to add new parts with known footprints but you still need to make them for non standard parts. Also if a component has a kind of standard footprint, but needs eg bigger pads for some reason, you also need to figure that out.

Eagle is a faff be user everything has to either be copied from another library, or you need to make it yourself. But once thaf library is done, it's pretty portable. I'm an Eagle user and am used to it; I can make parts fairly quickly now.

There are also parametric component generators (library.io) which takes a lot of the stress out of it.

[zrobotics]

For me, the big problem isn't the underlying systems, but the UI on top of them. I've had a board where identical parts needed different footprints, and the kicad system made that very easy to manage. However, the UI & workflow is far too different between creating symbols and footprints, making it harder to learn and easier to forget.