I don't understand your 'definition' of a customer. A customer is just someone using a product.
Paid or not, that is totally irrelevant. If a company brings out a product on the market and want it to grow/more people will be using it you simply need to invest a lot of time and effort in finding out what customers want.
That is exactly the root of the problem. You are treating this as another piece of software that you buy at a store and when something doesn't work to your liking, you go and complain to its author(s)/support. Which is perfectly ok, you have paid for a product and if it doesn't work as it should, you should have all the right to complain.
However, this concept flies totally out of the window the moment the "product" we are talking about is software written by a bunch of guys doing it in their free time (for the most part). They are giving you their work for free so you are literally complaining about a gift horse. That's what I have meant about the meaning of "customer".
Your (and many others') suggestions are certainly well intentioned. However, when there are 10 or more such "customers" constantly complaining about this and that or suggesting improvements to suit their needs on the development mailing list, it is a major distraction. This is not a company that has a dedicated team for doing customer support. So these requests won't get anything done any faster because those developers are
still working on it in their free time - but now have to deal with these issues on top of it. At some point people simply have to say "no" (or ignore the requests) otherwise nothing would ever get done. And then you see them as arrogant and feel your feedback isn't welcome. From the developer's point of view it is a no-win situation.
Also keep in mind that these people work on the project because it is fun for them and they are enjoying it, not because you (or someone else) is paying them. Which also means they will prioritize work they find interesting and not the work that you may find important. That's the way it works and all this talk about what "customers want" and "growing a market" is simply meaningless in this context. It just doesn't apply, period. It is not a commercial project trying to gain market share.
I have worked on similar projects myself and a decent GUI is not complicated to make at all.
Then please do join the project and help out! Competent interaction designers are hard to come by. However, I am afraid that a decent GUI (I am not talking about slapping a few controls together in a UI designer!) is far from a trivial thing to design and implement, especially when it has to please many users with fairly strong opinions.
EVERY professional piece of software like Altium, Solid Works, PTC Creo, Maya and even thinks like Adobe Premiere Pro and similar suits, users can change a lot on the GUI, move windows, change a ton of short-cuts and so on.
Shortcuts you can redefine in Kicad too. The rest - I have personally never felt the need to reorganize the toolbars or menus (there aren't really any "windows" to change in Kicad), because I rarely if ever use them, with most of the work being done by the keyboard shortcuts. That doesn't mean that such feature wouldn't be useful but it is not really something I have been missing so far. There are much more annoying issues than this in the program - e.g. like having half of the PCB functionality available in the legacy canvas only and all the new stuff in the OpenGL one only, forcing constant switching between the two until everything gets ported to OpenGL.
However, everything on your list is big $$$ software developed by huge companies with dedicated teams working on this for decades. Not a fair comparison at all, IMO - the amount of resources available is several orders of magnitude different. If you want to compare, compare with something like Eagle - which has an even worse interface, IMO, and lacks plenty of features that Kicad now has, all that despite it has always been a (fairly expensive) commercial product with a company behind it.
If the Kicad team had e.g. the AutoDesk resources behind them like the Maya (or now the Eagle) team has, I am sure the development would go a lot faster (people could actually work full time on Kicad!) and things would be better. Alas, they don't. Based on the Github stats, there are about 2 active developers and 2 more semi-regular contributors. The closest they got to full time staff were about 2 developers from CERN working on some features for a while, one full time and one part time.
In this case it's not only frustrating for users, but I think also even missed changes for the team that's working on KiCad.
The point is, I don't get why people get ALL worked up by it.
People give well meant feedback to make a very potential products awesome, and than your response is 'maybe it is not a product suitable for your needs'.
I am sorry, but that's not how you run a business anymore nowadays, if it's not only for just the attitude and the approach.
People do get worked up because a ton of very good work done by a small team of people in their free time is constantly being dismissed and denigrated only because it doesn't meet some arbitrary criteria for "professionalism".
Everyone wants to offer feedback but few people if any contribute to the project in any manner. Be it by code, by monetary contributions, documentation, anything. Yes, you certainly don't run business in this way - but the Kicad team
is not running a business! It is a community run project, with people trying to do something they enjoy (and to scratch their own itch) in their free time. So unless you understand this and realize that the project isn't running by the same rules as companies and commercial projects do, you will be hitting your head against a wall, complaining about arrogant and lazy developers and be frustrated be the lack of appreciation for your well intentioned effort.
The response about the product not being suitable for your needs was meant exactly as written - not as an offence but a statement of fact. If I test a tool and it doesn't work for what I am doing, I will look for another one, notabene if it is a free one and I won't loose any money by ditching it (apart from maybe time spent on it). I am using Kicad for my PCBs because it works for me, not because I am some sort of a fanatic - but I am keeping an eye out for other options and evaluating them from time to time (e.g. tried EasyEDA recently, used Eagle before, etc).
I am sorry if my message came across as "worked up", I didn't mean to offend you nor anyone else. I admit that the tone is a bit blunt because this topic is a never ending story, being brought up again and again. Always the same issues about the development team being unresponsive or not willing to accept suggestions from the professionals, "unusable UI", "having potential but will be usable only if ...", etc. always by people who expect the same things they get when they buy $5k/seat software package, be it features or "customer service" - from a 2 person team of volunteers working on their pet project. It is literally the
, if there ever was one.