i adore hugin, but it can just absolutely fall off a cliff in some cases. i was recently trying to get it to figure out the alignment of four separate cameras. i gave it a bunch of images from them, with all sorts of nice calibration targets, but it just kept churning out complete garbage and i couldn't get them aligned no matter how precisely i went in and laid out control points.

i went and fed it some real world images that should've been near-worthless for alignment (blue sky, empty fields) and hugin immediately produced a great alignment with no effort.

so... there's definitely room for some alternative software in this space. i'm excited to give mrcal a go when i've got the time.