[atoav]

Horizon EDA was started by a guy who didn’t want to use a closed source EDA tool like Altium for his final university electronics project and wasn’t happy with KiCAD.

He planned it very carefully (so I wouldn’t call it a hack) and years after it is still going without any funding. This isn’t that uncommon in open source IMO.

Of course this is not a value judgement, there are quick hacks that work perfectly well and slower more planned out projects that never work at all — each aproach has it’s pros and cons.