Not really, IME.
Let's say I want a SMPS. Something basic, say 12-24v in 3.3v out at 1A. I can buy a module and solder it onto my PCB, or copy a reference design out of a PDF, or vendors like TI have tools like webbench to help me generate a custom design.
The vendor wants to hand me a proven design and have me buy their chips. I want to be handed a proven design and know my project's going to work right first time. But no, the likes of Altium have got to have their vendor lock-in by making copy-and-paste absolutely as difficult as possible.
There's no great skill or inventiveness in me drawing out the world's billionth SMPS design. I'm not "solving a hard problem" - it's drudgery.
> and there's a pretty decent chance these days they'll be openly available for the part you are using. But they always contain mistakes,
So you'd agree, then, that when a human copies from a PDF manually there's a substantial chance of them introducing errors?
Are you and I not equally vulnerable to making such mistakes? Frankly I find it absurdly wasteful that the industry has transistors in the same package but with different pinouts and the 'solution' to keeping this stuff in order is... senior engineers checking junior engineers' work against PDFs manually.
Not really. KiCad is open-source and a very capable EDA suite, for example.
The problem is that it's a really hard problem for which no one-size-fits-all solution exists. There's basically an infinite number of properties which are important when designing electronics, many of which will have to be nudged depending on your design. Capturing all that in a data format is virtually impossible, and any attempt to do so is likely to degrade into something unusual quite quickly once you get past the trivial stuff.
In my experience reading it out of a PDF is usually not that big of a deal, once you get used to it. For things like schematics symbols and footprints there are data interchange formats available - and there's a pretty decent chance these days they'll be openly available for the part you are using. But they always contain mistakes, and I find it way faster to just roll my own from the PDF than to copy it ready-made from a 3rd party and fix the errors.