[crote]

> Packing components isn't the problem. Routing traces isn't the problem. Both of those can be accomplished with fairly straightforward algorithms. We've had auto-placing and auto-routing for decades, and they serve their purposes well enough.

I have to disagree. Even small subsections of, say, routing are already NP-hard. In my experience autorouters are universally awful: they fall apart as soon as you feed them anything which isn't completely trivial. The problem is just too complicated to solve with a bunch of heuristics and clever approximations.