How is Altium designer a Car vs a bicycle? Is CircuitStudio really that stripped down/terrible?
It is not terrible. But features are missing. It is deliberately stripped down, as said, and it will make your work slower. If your job is primarily electronics, and you spend some time on PCB design (say, at least 20% of your time) get Altium, because the productivity is soo much higher.
For example:
In CS, I need to do an online search and select, just to be able to place a resistor. It takes me 2-3 minutes. I need it to exist in their database, and know the part number, before I can place it. In Altium, I have an excel sheet with the standard series resistors, I have one footprint, it is liked together in Altium, so I can place one just by typing the resistance value into the search field. 4 seconds. Imagine that all these basic tasks are slowed down. Instead of hotkeys (burned into the brain) you need to fiddle with ribbon menu. For placing a track. You loose time, only a few seconds, but it all adds up.
It needs some setup, and knowledge how to use it, but it saves time so money. Overall, I dont think, that CS is wort it for electronics designers (with salary), even if they give it away for free. As I said, you can go with unicycle somewhere, but it will be slower than walking. I can probably design a PCB faster in MS Paint, than in Eagle. And CS is the bicycle. Fine for small boards, few dozen components, few boards per year. I would design ie an Arduino shield in it, to go to Kickstarter.