I'm not sure I'd hold up Eagle high as a bar to beat.

Eagle may not be a high bar to beat but it is a commercial product that in my experience KiCAD has exceeded.

It surely isn't, but is a commercial product that get much less heat then Kicad.

Can you respond to the specific criticisms of OP then?

Not every discussion has a winner and I'm not Kicad's lawyer. I'm just honestly adding to the discussion, not trying to "win" a debate or anything.

That was not what I was inferring, I was just geniously interested in counterpoints.

I didn't say that it's impossible to do these things in KiCad, it's rather that KiCad doesn't offer a lot of assistance for those scenarios. In the extreme case, you can design your PCB by hand-writing the Gerber files, but the point of an EDA tool is that it should handle the automatable stuff.

I agree that it has wide room for improvements, but I still find it very comparable to Eagle, for example.

But it is in a steady improvement route, while operating in a much harder segment to attract the resources they need than most free/open-source projects: their best users aren't high-level programmers, neither UX experts, and UX experts and high-level programmers aren't their typical users[1].

I still use Altium for my most complex designs, even for reasons beyong those you've posted, but it surely can be used for professional projects beyond the simplest ones, even taking advantage of the automation by learning a few simple patterns.

[1] Except, of course, by coincidence. As a primarily hardware engineer, I'm trying to help by re-learning desktop programming, something I haven't done in years.