Thanks Bassman. I will give the extra a try and see if it makes a difference.
I went through Contxtual Electronic's Kicad tutorial videos. The transition from schema to layout goes through manual import of the netlist (why?).
Because that's the way it is. A lot of ECAD tools were like that, because the schematic and layout programs were separate. From the schematic, you generate a netlist, and you import that netlist into the layout program.
I use Altium at the day job, and that's still basically what happens, although it's done behind your back. You choose "Compile PCB Project," let it run and build its netlist, and then you do "Update PCB Document" and you go through the whole ECO thing before the netlist opens in the layout.
How does it work, are changes in the layout (e.g. name change) propagated back to the schema?
Unfortunately, there is no back-annotation from pcbnew to eeschema. You can't edit the netlist in pcbnew (for instance if you were changing FPGA pin assignments), but I suppose that most users would just go back to the schematic, make the change, then generate the new netlist and re-import it into pcbnew.
What I would love to see in Kicad (and I've thought about doing this in Python but I need to really understand the PCB document format first) is to update the reference designators in pcbnew geographically and then back-annotate that to the schematic. (Technicians hate randomly-ordered ref-deses.) I know it's on the wish-list but it's not a priority.
What about future schema changes, do I still need to reimport? Will it preserve the existing partial layout?
Yes, any time you make a change to the schematic, you need to generate a new netlist and import that into the layout. And yes, your existing layout is preserved. The netlist-import dialog has some options, such as whether to change or preserve existing footprints, what to do about unconnected nets, and so forth.
15 years ago I used to to manual netlist import from Orcad to Protel but I guess I got spoiled by eagles's automatic bidirectional sync between the schema and the layout.
That is on the list of desired features ... everyone wants it.
You do know that if you have your schematic and your layout open at the same time, when you click on something in the schematic the layout zooms to that part, and the converse?