Element14 = failure as support mechanism, hello Altium ?

I'm not E14 so can't offer any support, sorry.  However, I am interested to understand why you use (continue to use) this product?  Is it a work thing?

After many years of PADS, a number with Allegro / Cadence / Orcad and the last 4 with Altium Designer, I like CircuitStudio (most of the time) for moonlighting and now, semi retired but active and for what it delivers at its price point.  I look at Kicad every 6 months or so and it has some ways to go.  Never cared much for the Eagle interface and Autodesk ownership is not a feature for me at least. Unfortunately, at its price point, I'm afraid CS doesn't attract much attention from its owner.

For crying out loud, if you're up to Beta 3, with people testing for several years (guess), release the darned thing !  It's software and is meant to be updated periodically.

If Microsoft held back, we'd still be on WIndows 98, salivating for SE 

After many years of PADS, a number with Allegro / Cadence / Orcad and the last 4 with Altium Designer, I like CircuitStudio (most of the time) for moonlighting and now, semi retired but active and for what it delivers at its price point.  I look at Kicad every 6 months or so and it has some ways to go.  Never cared much for the Eagle interface and Autodesk ownership is not a feature for me at least. Unfortunately, at its price point, I'm afraid CS doesn't attract much attention from its owner.

For crying out loud, if you're up to Beta 3, with people testing for several years (guess), release the darned thing !  It's software and is meant to be updated periodically.

If Microsoft held back, we'd still be on WIndows 98, salivating for SE 

Interesting.  I’d have to say I find Kicad excellent, particularly for the types of boards typical of hobbyists and enthusiasts create but obviously you know what works for you and what you need.  shabaz created an extensive and useful blog about V6 recently if you do a search for it.  I’ve been on this site for 4 years and posts about CS fall into one of the following;

• support is non existent
• I’ve paid for a yesr’s maintenance but got nothing for it: no major or minor release nor bug fixes
• when is the new version coming out.

In 4 years I’ve seen no new version or anyone post anything positive about it.  Admittedly I don’t follow it very closely but it’s always left me wondering why people don’t cut their losses but keeping hoping against all empirical evidence to the contrary.

Sorry I’m no help on this issue per se but bullet 1 is consistent and I wouldn’t be investing my money in something that the manufacturer doesn’t care about.

I've used Altium DXP, a long time ago, and DXP was feature-rich, but productivity was awful. I used it to complete one project, a 4-layer board with the approximate complexity of a handheld PDA, i.e. mainly digital logic and microprocessor. Circuit Studio is a (deliberately) feature-crippled version of DXP from the screenshots of Circuit Studio that I have seen.

I moved to EAGLE, and productivity sky-rocketed. I've completed hundreds of boards with it. In-between, I've used a really nice Zuken product which was fantastic to use, but it's an obsolete product they no longer sell.

Since Christmas, I've used KiCad, and done three boards with it since then, including about a dozen custom components and footprints, maybe more. The boards were not very complex, but I used them to try out a lot of the functionality I would want to use going forward, and the very first board was successful, everything was as desired/expected.
Sure, KiCad operations feel clunky in places, and is missing some functionality, but it is still easy-to-use, clearly has sufficient features for complex boards, it is good enough for CERN, and I've not had any significant problems adapting to it within weeks. I created a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Be7XOMmPQE , it's just 50 minutes, to cover an end-to-end schematic and board workflow. Andrew and additional forum members are more experienced than me, so I was confident when starting with KiCad, that I could ask my KiCad questions here and get lots of support, and that was the case. You can see my train of thought from day 1 with KiCad here:  /technologies/open-source-hardware/f/forum/50425/kicad-for-non-kicad-e-g-ex-eagle-enthusiasts---a-discussion and you can see from that discussion that I just typed what I did, what my issues were, and everyone helped a fellow engineer out.

Also, I raised one bug report, a developer reached out to me, and it was resolved in the next release (there have already been two dot releases in as many months, but I'm still using the December release, I'll upgrade sometime). I raised a request for information on the KiCad forum to try that out too, and I had a response within an hour or so. It is very responsive support.

What you're looking for with Altium, is a support model that doesn't exist for that product.. maybe it's worth just biting the bullet, learn a new package, and if the Altium support model ever changes, then renewing your license for Altium.

It is not a pleasant situation to be dependent on a complex software product that has less support than you need. After my experiences with EAGLE and KiCad, I would not use Circuit Studio even if the Circuit Studio support model was different. Going forward, from my perspective, unless there is a very good reason, I am going to use KiCad by default.