Guess what, user adoption increased dramatically, because it became pleasant (or tolerable) to use by people that used literally any other program.

V8 included in the core many things that were plugins before, and replaced the old utilities that the neckbeards in the forum were crying to keep, or else! (or else more adoption.)

V9 had even more many improvements, but also many regressions, over V8. V10 might be the release that truly consolidates the core of the suite and then they can start really focus on high speed designs.

I've navigated many programs over my career, and unless a future employer mandates me to use Altium, or purely technical reasons (8+ layer, high speed designs) requires me to use Cadence, only kicad for me.

Incidentally, it feels like this past two years freeCAD GIMP and Inkscape have started moving away from listening to noisy members of the community, to useful members of the community. I'm seeing a slow but steady progress that will eventually accelerate and make both toold true alternatives, as it happened with KiCAD (though it will really be tough for GIMP, even if it's perfectly usable for many, many tasks, any graphic designer will kick and scream if they're not given the adobe suite, pity.)

Myself, i do very little basic graphics like replicate buttons and such things to not bother my colleague, or apply correction to my photos, i proudly do that in GIMP and inkscape.