Kicad isn't a simulator, it's a pcb designer.

>KiCad is faster, absolutely not better.

Not what I've heard, and CERN seems to think it's good enough for their particle colliders.

>No open source tooling can even remotely compare in ASIC implementation flow or FPGA implementation.

Yes, FPGA tools are a very different matter. I do wonder if this is really lock-in from vendors more than any preference by users, but still, sufficiently motivated users could reverse-engineer things to try to make a single open-source toolset that works with all vendors' FPGAs. Of course, the feasibility of this is questionable, but we've seen really impressive reverse-engineering efforts in other places in FOSS. Just look at how futile it is for YouTube to try to prevent people from downloading their videos.

> electronic design engineers rarely have the software skills required to develop EDA software.

You could say that about many other fields too, but then why do we have great tools like Blender, Krita, Audacity, etc.? Artists and musicians have great software skills, but electronics engineers don't? There's always been a huge overlap between EE and CS degrees, with "computer engineering" degrees coming about as a merger of the two fields decades ago, so I find this statement hard to believe.

Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. I've seen this in the software world too, with embedded systems engineers, though Linux, gcc, etc. has made huge inroads here, though it took decades, and mainly came from the Linux adherents pushing downwards into the embedded space from the desktop space, not from any interest by the existing engineers in the embedded space.

Just look, for instance, at FPGAs: almost all the tooling is proprietary, very expensive, and very buggy too. Or look at PCB design: Altium seems to be the standard here still, despite Kicad having made huge advances and by most accounts being as good or even better. It took decades (Kicad started in 1992) for the FOSS alternatives here to really catch on much, and only really because PCBs became cheap enough for hobbyists to design and construct their own (mainly because of Chinese PCB companies), and because CERN contributed some resources.

I'm not sure what the deal is with engineers hating collaboratively-developed and freely-available software, but it's a real thing in my experience. It's like someone told them that FOSS is "socialism" and they just reflexively dismiss or hate it.