1. yeah these are super expensive. Even the cheaper ones are close to a grand a liscense 2. definately got to have a front-end. Writing netlist by hand is suffering. 3. Interestingly (to me) the components are more or less portable between them. With only a little manual writing i have translated components from ORCAd p-spice, to ISpice, to LTSpice. No idea on the liscensing for that. (I suspect the IC manufacturers produce these)

I think speed is very much a question of what kind of thing you are doing. I agree it often doesn't matter. and without your 3 points, it certainly doesn't matter