it is surprising (or not?) that there is such a vast gulf in terms of automated tooling between the semiconductor world and pcb routing world.

i guess maybe there are less degrees of freedom and more 'regularity' in the semiconductor space? sort of like a fish swimming in an amorphous ocean vs. having to navigate uneven terrain with legs and feet. the fish in some sense is operating in a much more 'elegant' space, and that is reflected in the (beautiful?) simplicity of fish vs. all the weird 'nonlinear' appendages sticking out of terrestrial animals - the guys who walk are facing a more complicated problem space.

i guess with pcbs you have 'weird' or annoying constraints like package dimensions, via size, hole size, trace thickness, limited layer count, etc.