As far as the cost of CS, I would encourage everyone to negotiate with E14 / Newark. The one thing I have been told so far as to limitations is that panelizing is not included in CS which for me is ok as I can either do it in AD or with a STEP export and import into SW. I can understand that my friends in industry that use AD all the time do not have any problem with the menu system. Given that most tools are going this way, I don't spend time upfront, although, the keyboard shortcuts will take a while (View Fit) sticks in my brain from Protel 99 SE. So for CircuitStudio, it's ribbon interface is intuitively structured for such as myself to pick up and use. I use whatever tools I need to get these jobs done and these include, SolidWorks, ECAD tools such as simulation, and PCB design. In work for my customer, I do design work, manufacturing engineering, and quality control. I generalize, saying Altium, due to, apart from the ribbon interface structure, your course content is equally applicable to Designer, CS, and CM. Your courses that you offer on your website are a fabulous means to get up to speed with Altium. Myself, not being in a position to pay the 10K Altium Designer price tag, I desperately required compatibility to AD when I work at my home office. I follow EEVBlog quite closely and Dave Jones has excellent insight into Altium as well as most things related to electronics engineering. At work, our software is Altium Designer and I had completed some earlier projects in KiCAD which has no translation to Altium.

My exposure to CS so far is as follows as well as how I transitioned into it. The ease of use of CircuitStudio will make it a winner, once they fix this item I identified for them and probably a few others, that will probably come up as it gains more user exposure. Altium Designer, by itself, does not address this vast segment. Having an aggressive mass marketing partner like Newark will, in my opinion, dominate the low cost PCB tool market. In the 4 product offerings that Altium now have, it seems that the overall market share increase, due mostly to Circuit Maker and Circuit Studio will soar. So far Robert I have heard nothing back as of 2:20 am, September 9 as I write this.

Altium circuitstudio price