A lot of us don't necessarily have the time to invest for actively contributing. Even so, those familiar with open source projects of this size know that it's often not a very democratic process. The maintainers do decide what the priorities should be and have no particular incentive to take other points of view into account, nor any particular direct contribution.
All I am saying is this: if you followed the developers' email listserv, or logged into their IRC channel, you would see that Kicad development is more democratic than you state. Wayne takes suggestions seriously, and when there are decisions about what to implement and how, there is a lot of discussion. Sometimes things are held off from implementation because it would seriously break existing code and existing designs. What might seem an easy feature to implement may not be so easy to do!
The developers actually understand the PCB design process (something other commenters seem to not understand).
I follow the list, occasionally make suggestions ("... from a user's perspective, I think ...") and I run nightlies on macOS to test the program on that platform. I mention that because I'm impressed by the amount of discussion that does go on, and impressed by the amount of code contribution from non-core developers.
I will say, again, that complaining on this forum doesn't get results. If you have suggestions, enter them into the Launchpad bug reporter (as wishlist item). Ask on the mailing list if your suggestion is reasonable. It's a responsive group. But manpower is what it is, and the more that people can contribute, the better.
@donotdespisethesnake: you're saying they listen to the users yet gave me a good example (which was the whole topic of this thread) that they don't always. I'm familiar with open-source projects and many devs can be very stubborn; I was pointing out that the "works on my machine" is definitely not a sane attitude.
I've been testing nightlies of Kicad for a long time, and when I hit a bug, I report it as comprehensively as possible. I've never gotten a "works on my machine!" response. Sometimes the problems are platform-specific, so the developers who know my platform (macOS) best have to chase down the bug. But in every case, the response has been excellent, especially considering time zone differences.
As for the additional (a bit off-topic) GUI rant, that was just a quick rant. Point in case was that improving usability, along with improving library management, would definitely make KiCad a very serious contender IMO. As it is, not quite so.
If you were following the developer listserv, you would know that they really do recognize the library management issue as a serious problem, and there is a lot of work going on to improve it. And they want to do that without breaking existing designs. GUI usability is improving, too, and the rewrite of the schematic capture will go a long way towards making people happy (things like consistent hotkeys across the programs, etc etc).
Actually, I find LTSpice editor much more productive than KiCad's one. Admittedly it's rather primitive but does the job for editing circuits for simulation and is reasonably intuitive. I wouldn't use it for general-purpose schematics design, because it lacks features and its look is rough, but it's not that bad usability-wise.
I think it sucks, but since it's only used for simulating small circuits, I deal with it. I'm not going to go on the LTSpice forum and demand that it be changed -- the inertia is too great and users will complain.
I just find it sad that a lot of sofware (and obivously not just KiCad for that matter) tends to be plagued with feature creep, yet often fails to address long-standing issues.
When saying "yet often fails to address long-standing issues," it's helpful to detail those issues. Maybe the issues
have been addressed (maybe in a nightly build)?
For the record: I defend Kicad because it actually works. I've designed a dozen boards with it, and I've never had an issue with getting the boards fabbed, and they all work. Any mistakes on the boards were mistakes I made, not because there was a problem with Kicad. Are there quirks and issues with it that I wish didn't exist or that it worked better? Sure. Is Altium better? Probably. Is Altium $13,000 better for the kinds of boards I design? Not at all.