[gaze]

Yeah TopoR is really impressive. The thing is, I don't find that the hard problem is just the routing -- it's the combination of the placement and the routing. I find that I place with some idea of how I want to do the routing. I really haven't met any professional PCB designers that use the autorouter. I can see how it might have been useful several decades ago with low speed designs that had massive memory busses. Like if you were routing an arcade machine board or something. But now? Signal integrity is very important and everything is serial.

If I need something more complex very quickly, I usually do some combination of hot gluing and cutting up dev boards and dead-bugging.