On the contrary, Altium had been an engineering-led company for 25+ years. And the close relationship between developers and front-line staff / customers is what made the transition from Protel (weird, Tasmanian company / SW with a strange UI and unconventional pricing model, workflow, data / file format, etc) to Altium / Altium Designer possible.
We became the leader, eventually supplanting the deeply entrenched "orcad/pads" stack, despite almost every headwind you might imagine. In fact, I dont ever recall the company having Product Managers until after that period and long after Nick Martin (founder and CEO) 'left'.
The great thing about this industry is that it's small, led by a handful of amazing technologists and of course that gaggle of business dudes (I fall into that last bucket as much as I'd love to be in the first!).
As Dave's pointed out, there are ex Altium dudes working at Autodesk. Altium's new VP of Marketing is an ex Autodesk guy. Question is: what happens when EAGLE's UI / UX is tidied up and we add better rules / routing (sketch, bus, better diff pair, etc), better MCAD integration, better library management, release management, etc. We know how to do it but we also have the freedom to do it the way many of us wanted to all along (and with the experience of building these things sometimes 3, 4, 5 different ways, each time getting better as we went). We dont need to be Altium Designer. We need to be EAGLE and we need to rethink *everything*. Even if we reach the same conclusions.
Sure, subscription is a headwind for some (for us just as much as it might be for you) but thinking about cadsoft / EAGLE, consider the parallels: i.e. strange SW from some far off place in Bavaria, with a different dialect (#respect to my Tasmanian friends, but you dudes are hard to understand sometimes!), weird unconventional UI, strange workflow, unconventional approach to just about every feature...Reminds me a lot of where Protel was in 99/00. And I for one (and Im not the only one) have first hand experience making that transition from the underdog to the incumbent. The development team is likewise charged up and ready for the challenge.
FTR, I have enormous respect for my friends still at Altium, still think Altium Designer is the "tool to beat" and I'm proud of everything we achieved over there. However, at the same time, I look forward to growing EAGLE's market position at a price point that *nobody* is ready to contend with. We aren't doing this to drive incremental growth. We're doing this to see EAGLE and KiCAD take over the world. (Yep, you heard me right.)