..............Whilst we wait for @Simon to hopefully answer....ill speak on KICAD if i may.....i am certain it will stay free of charge, and will become "THE ONE". Knocking all others out of its way.....Unless Altium perhaps is bought out, and then dished out for free everywhere.....dont honestly known how Altium fully compares to KICAD, but am told KICAD is just as good....and can do the same high end stuff.
Not in a million years.
OK, maybe in a
million years. But right now, KiCad can't hold a candle to Altium or the other professional programs. Can you make it produce excellent boards? Absolutely. Does it support you in doing so the same way Altium can? Absolutely not.
Basically, "KiCad is just as good as Altium" is a typical open-source software fanboy claim. It's just as untrue as the claims that "LibreOffice is just as good as Microsoft Office" or "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop". In every case, the open-source program can do all of the basics (and then some), but simply cannot compete with the feature sets that those established commercial programs built up over the course of decades.
While I have every reason to believe that open-source server software (servers, databases, etc.) can do everything their commercial counterparts can, that simply isn't the case for desktop software. The fact that no open source desktop app has ever managed to dethrone its commercial counterparts... well that speaks volumes -- s does the fact that in many cases, open source server software has dethroned commercial equivalents. That means the market is willing to go open source when it's good enough. And the corollary that open source desktop software just isn't there. (Nor do I think it ever will on the whole, for various reasons, but that's well beyond the scope of this discussion.)
As for your trouble with Altium: You really need to just watch some tutorials or something. I gave an Altium primer to the apprentices at my old work, and had them designing a little board in under 2 hours.