[claxo]

>I can’t see people paying thousands of dollars per year for maintenance on tools like AD. It makes no sense at all.

I started to use Kicad at v5. Some interesting projects in v4 did not load clean. v6 was released, it had some problems to load v5 projects. And now v7 seems to not load some v6 projects.

If the AD story for support loading old version projects is good then I think they will do fine.