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.
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.
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?
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.