Kicad is FREE. Why are any of you complaining? If you don't like it go use something else.
I really hate this attitude, it is unfortunately pervasive in many open source communities and it does a lot of damage to the open source movement.
Yes, well. Some people hate this attitude, some other people hate those who whine while not being entitled to anything much.
Either way, hating is the easy part.
Thing is, open-sourcing some software in itself doesn't make developers owe anything to their users. They're already cool enough to share their projects and give them essentially free time.
And your attitude is bound to change completely depending on which side you're on. As a user, you feel your suggestions, rants and whining are all reasonable, useful and should be listened to. The same people getting on the other side of the fence suddenly realize there's a bunch of people "watching you work" while explaining to you how you should do it.
Now sure things get a bit different when said software gets *promoted* in some way - which is always the case when the project gets backed up by some large organization. For KiCad, that was the CERN. As a project gets "pushed" as an alternative to commercial solutions, users' expectations grow. That's natural. And if you actively promote your project, you become responsible for that. It's no more some kind of personal project that you have happened to share, and don't care if other people use it or not.
As to KiCad more specifically - the UI is not that bad for the layout editor. But the layout editor is what has seen the most overhaul so far. It's on par with many other commercial ones. All CAD software pretty much have quirks anyway. The schematic editor - and project management - is something else. It's more questionable indeed, and most of it comes from legacy. Same for library management. I don't think it's like developers don't want to make things better - it's more that it's a big endeavor, and since many users have become used to that, any changes may trigger as much, if not more whining than the current situation.
And as to funding, I honestly thought it got more than this. Around $20k-$30k a year is very little. Must be one of the most ridiculous amount I've seen for such a (now) widely-used project.
At some point, I think there were a few developers working (and getting paid) full-time on it. From what I've read, the lead developer for instance had been hired full time but he got laid off? Not sure what is the current situation. If someone has more details...
Given that KiCad has now a solid user base, but quite a few with divergent views on how it should evolve, I'm surprised there hasn't been a working fork yet. Or maybe there is, and I'm not aware of it?