Thank you for your message. I'll try to answer your questions below and hopefully you'll discover that what is in-development is intended to address items 1 & 2 in your list very directly. Timing is everything and we are not slowing down but instead, we are in fact moving faster, just with bigger problems to address that take more time.
1) Without getting into the specifics of any competitor (I worked at the one you mentioned for nearly 15 years, since the days of Accel / PCAD) we know what we have to do in Schematic & PCB to deliver the best-in-class tools for high-speed/low-speed, analog, digital, RF, microwave, backdrilling, length-tuning, tapering, teardropping, flex, etc. However I would hesitate to compare what we have planned with others because Fusion has given us a much wider net (😀) to cover things like electronics cooling, fan design / heat sinking, even CNC control for PCB prototypes or nesting for PCB panels (the reason why we extrude the copper in the 3D board). Whether this ends up in EAGLE or Fusion, depends really on having access to the best of the Autodesk geometry, rendering, simulation, etc. pipeline and the work to limit 'rebuilding' what we already have from scratch (imagine integrating Fusion into EAGLE versus EAGLE into Fusion).
Thinking ahead, imagine PCB with a "Constraints Mode" that determined tangency, snapped to arcs|circles|splines, snapped better object to object and which could deal with complex poly lines / splines / polygons in a way that was more like Mechanical CAD sketch tools (or dimensioning like MCAD!). Just for board shapes or alignment of objects this would be a great feature to have.
Thus we are intending to deliver (like the new Push & Shove capability that can make room for components) something comprehensive and undeniably powerful; but for now, we need two tools to achieve the broader objective of building products and we are supporting them both. Meanwhile, we are laying foundations that will help us make the decision about how to consolidate the experience so you only every learn one environment that is as direct & easy to use as possible.
A few hints (and no timelines, as I mentioned these are BIG things to solve) ...we are right now working on Rules & Constraints, even more improvements to Routing / Push / etc, more physical design reuse, improvements to sketch routing, polygon handling, true-type fonts, and a lot more with little intent to slow down. We are likewise looking at rendering performance, graphics pipelines, memory performance, etc and we are working hard on schematic & libraries to bring them into the modern age. Much of this work is still in code that looks like EAGLE but much has had to change because the EAGLE data model didnt support some of these changes. We're likewise reviewing all of the experiences with more than 3-4 steps and trying to simplify hundreds of multi-step workflows that look more like our call-stack than they do component placement for example (Add->Select->Place->Name->Value-Esc->Add->Select->Place->Value...etc.). We've been a bit quiet because many of these are long lead-time problems that take multiple people to get right (a luxury we hadnt had prior to this point).
Still, I would like to imagine that one day we are working in one code base and you are using one 'set' of tools that look and feel similar. Since porting Fusion into EAGLE isnt going to happen, then the future will mean building something better on the Fusion framework without compromising EAGLE's capability. That too is a long lead-time problem and will take a lot of effort to get us there. Hence why we just decided charging you for EAGLE and Fusion wouldn't be fair. We need you if we are to be successful and we needed to make it possible for you to work in both to help us get this right.
2|3|4) I think item "1" kind of explains item two but for now we are two independent systems that are expanding what users can do. If it can't be done in EAGLE or doesnt make sense, we are releasing it in Fusion. If it was built on the branch that targets Fusion, we release it when it's ready. If we can (like splines) deliver something back into EAGLE, then we will do that instead. As far as timing is concerned, I think the essential timing of "one platform" the north star is 'when we deliver the better experience overall' and that has to be able to compete with other, more sophisticated tools, without compromising ease of use. I wont build another "xyz" tool because we would just be competing in the same arena as company "xyz" and not really focused on what matters more, user productivity. If we end up with a UI that looks like company "xyz" we have failed. If every operation needs a menu item and the menus are 5 layers deep, we failed. So we are really thinking deeply about how to avoid those things. At which point that doesnt mean EAGLE stops working, just that the best experience will be an improvement over EAGLE today and you would already have an open door to just walk into when you're ready. My expectation is that probably takes us a year or more to get as much as we want to get into the SW and get the XD issues worked out or even update our build pipelines, CICD pipelines (test automations), QA, etc.
Ratsnest is a good example of where we are at. With regard to ratsnest, just untangling (😀) the EAGLE code around ratsnest took a massive effort. The same was true with Layers. In the process, we changed things considerably underneath. That was built from a forked code base that includes aspects of Fusion in the mix (a project that internally we were calling electron...get it? Fusion? Electron? Im a physics guy so it was funny to me & nobody understood my first choice, lepton.).
We decided to release it (not delay it) and ensure it is super solid, then we'll decide whether the changes we made (like many others) can / should be supported on the two platforms (Id like it to be easier but the more we delay things the less value we deliver to the user community). Truly, we'd like users to start to poke around in Fusion and tell us what they think is missing, get them complaining, excited, talking with us (like this conversation) and then decide how to proceed / what our next steps should be. (I personally believe we should do this in collaboration with the community and let you have opinions on our strategy.). However we also understand that folks have a day job and we have to continue to make them productive.
5). To get started in Fusion the first thing to note is that we introduced the Electronic Design document. I would just think about this as a wrapper that binds together a schematic and a PCB (single pair today, but with a goal of eventually supporting other m:n relationships). That allows reuse of the same schematic but targeting different physical form-factors (eg. an SD card reader that could be a USB device, a module, desktop, laptop, etc.). As far as learning Fusion Electronics, @edwin.robledo & @jorge_garcia have produced a lot of content to get started and there are tutorials located here and here.
Sorry for such a long post but please keep sharing your thoughts.
Best regards
Matt
