3D flex board design. I have never seen that before. I guess this is something Autodesk could add.
Or vice versa, merge parts of eagle in their 3D stuff.
You mean something like this?
http://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADOH/Presenting+a+Rigid-Flex+Design+in+3DAlthough I admit that the Target! 3D Design goes a bit further by allowing a 3d shape for routing. However, the (current) market for this seems somewhat smaller to me.
Seriously, why kill a hobbyist level product to create a professional level one
Because in-between $100 CAD and $10,000+ CAD, there is no dominant product, but there is certainly a market demand for a product. If Autodesk can create an attractive platform out of Eagle, there's likely more than a few high-end amateurs and professionals that would jump on board for an annual cost that's close to 1/4th of Altium's annual maintenance fee.
Last time I looked, Circuit Studio was 900€ ($970) and there are plenty of others (e.g. Diptrace) in that range. If you said $100 to $1000, I would have agreed that there is no decent product (or none of the decent products without severe imposed limitations). And as james_s has pointed out, these are perpetual licenses. I don't think that in this price range regular updates are really such a strong selling point once the software has a reasonable amount of features and is stable.
So the "subscription only" model doesn't make sense here, and Eagle doesn't make much sense for the mid-to-high-end market. Apart from that, I think the ROI for a decent product is bad below $1000. Otherwise someone else would have established a better/uncrippled product there. There are plenty of small CAD packages, so it's not like nobody is trying.
Because in a worst case scenario the Eagle name is established. And maybe that is all Autodesk is after, the Splash Screen.
I would think that large portions of the UI still have value to Autodesk.
For all we know Autodesk is using Version 8 as sort of a stalking horse to test market acceptance. Maybe after substantial input they jump to version 10. With more customer feedback they make another overhaul and release it as Eagle 2 Version 1.0.0 The Eagle name is still there.
Large portions of the UI? Autodesk might be accused of many things, but the UIs of their (recent) products seem to be up to date. Apart from the fact that it is multi-platform capable, the same is not true for Eagle. Lots of modal dialogues, no multi-document handling etc. I doubt Eagle would fit very well there.
As for the name, I'm not sure whether it's worth that much. Most professionals frown on it (no matter whether they are right), most hobbyists/SMEs associate a strange interface with it. You can say there is no such thing as bad publicity, but the Eagle brand has pretty much opposite connotations as Autodesk. I could understand, if they would like to expand to the low-end market, Eagle would be useful. But then they shouldn't have changed the licensing model, as this only reinforces their current image of being expensive and aimed at corporations. No one will buy Eagle because it
used to be a good deal when it's not any more.
And as was pointed out before, the cost of switching ECAD packages is immensely high, once you've become accustomed to one. So in order to gain users from the existing packages in the same price area, they have to deliver a much better product. Until they give away their 3D MCAD for the same price (which would be a no brainer on it's own, but is
very unlikely to happen for their parametric packages), they don't have any edge over their competition.