Hi,
Well I have never used Altium, so I don't really know how they compare. It woudl seem that Kicad in recent versions behaves as you say, trying to autoroute things in stupid ways and making it annoying to delete these traces. Old versions did not have any autorouting, and that was perfectly fine for such simple projects. I didn't look yet if there is a way to disable or configure it. At leat it previews things in realtime so you can see it's going stupid before you actually place the track, so you can press escape and try again. And keyboard shortcuts help quite a lot in getting things done (backspace or delete to remove a track, etc).
It reminds me of a story about my father. He worked in a print shop and used a tool to cut vinyl stickers (to make big lettering to put on cars and trucks and the like). He used a tool from the 90s that ran on Windows 98. The machine required 3 parallel ports for driving the cutter, printer, and for the software protection dongle. At a time the company bought a new, larger, faster machine. It came with a new tool, but it seemed the tool was needlessly complex and made things 10x more difficult for no reason. He then got a training on it, and came back conforming that the tool was indeed bad designed, it was not just missing knowledge on how to use it.
And so until two years ago when he retired I helped keep that Windows 98 machine alive and connected to the company network so he could send files back and forth to it to use this old but efficient software. It was not always easy to find spare parts still compatible with it and getting windows network shares to work was a bit of a challenge sometimes, but it did work!
Well in any case, now that I know how to use Kicad I don't really plan to switch to something else, so I guess it's good enough.
