It's kind of a miracle that the output files from all the solutions are standardized and work across the industry to automate production and you can get a PCB made for $1. In the mechanical CAD/manufacturing world there is a LOT of manual work and discussion required. There are now automated quoting services, but they just put the onus on the user to upload files and manually input details into a proprietary system.

I'm not an expert for mechanics, but isn't what you discuss for mechanics usually tolerances or properties that are not directly involved in the outline of a part, such as materials used or roughness?

This stuff you still need to discuss. It's just that the basics are often enough. But, in my experience, if you want less than 0.3 mm tolerance on your PCB outline or a component needs a certain soldering cycle or method, you better tell your PCB manufacturer and you better do it on the phone, they may or may not look at the drawings. Once we only accidentally discovered that an isolator in a medical device was soldered using a temperature profile that exceeded its maximum temperature and thus the isolation was no longer guaranteed by the manufacturer.

Yes, tolerances and other things need to be discussed. STEP files can technically convey most of these things, but in practice most MCAD software cannot output these details to STEP files, and most machine shops won't check these details anyway. Both parties tend to revert to 2D PDF drawings to agree on details, and more importantly figure out whose fault it is in case of a mistake in production.

ECAD is way more standardized than MCAD for information sharing and version control, and at least has industry standard best practices. MCAD is still a wild west, with mostly proprietary tools used for version control (several thousand dollars per user per year) with no hope of interoperability. And each vendor that offers automated quoting uses a proprietary system, with a lot of manual inputs.

Granted, mechanical parts can be much more complex and it's easy to make unmanufacturable parts in MCAD, whereas ECAD is basically a stack of 2D layers. But still, as a mechanical engineer I am amazed at how easy it is to order a PCB or even an assembled PCB compared to ordering the simplest machined part.

All of that will probably be solved when an AI is released that generates code-based mechanical CAD models (supporting tolerance annotations per mechanical feature) based on text/voice input.

I give it 2 years tops :p

Who pays when the ML model gets something wrong and the batch is scrap?

The same people who pay when the humans get something wrong and the batch is crap I suppose?

Eagle was popular because you could get it for free as a hobbyist. That suckered me in years ago, convinced my employer to pay for the license, and then they got acquired by Autodesk literally 2 weeks later and refused to honor the license we had just bought, so I had to guard my installer binary with my life.

And then we ourselves got acquired by a company that could afford Altium.

Last I used KiCad for much (ca 2018), I found the workflow to be kind of clunky so I never expended much effort to get really good with it. For instance, their footprint assignment scheme caused so many errors because you couldn't, at that time, assign footprints to a given part in the component editor. Thus, you could spend a lot of time getting the footprint just so, then not notice you fat fingered the footprint assignment unless you did the old trick of printing out your solder mask and hand populating your board.

But whatever KiCad's current flaws, its not Fritzing, so that helps.

KiCAD is clunky but Eagle is just plain weird. Even copy/paste is a completely unique workflow compared to anything I've ever seen.

Eagle's poor copy and paste when I had to use it at university was a real shocker. So much work for such a common task. And it was so easy to get it wrong.

Sadly, it's not like KiCad excels there either. At least to my knowledge it's not possible to replicate a routed part of your module like it's already possible to reuse schematics sheets, is it?

KiCad has made significant improvements since 2018. There are still warts but it is much more polished overall.

I used Eagle in my first few years of hobby PCB design. It was fine, worked well. I really jumped on KiCad after development started to pick up and Mac support became really reliable. The workflow for managing schematic symbols and component footprints has _massively_ improved. It's definitely more usable. I think shortly after I started using KiCad, Eagle was acquired and that really soured me to it. Autodesk's products are fine, but I don't really care for their business practices. Your noting they were unwilling to honor a license brought prior to purchase is more kindling for that fire.