Homebrew PCBs

Hi,

I've been using Eagle for my PCBs, mainly on the strengths of its
above-average user interface, the good component libraries (made better
by user contributions), but especially its autorouter.

The autorouter is a pain, but gets the job done. Even if sometimes I
need to tweak some of the parameters, and manually move traces around a
bit after the job's done.

For me, the autorouter is a $deity$-send. I just don't have the patience
to lay out traces manually.

Some questions here:
 - do people here consider it lame to use autorouting?
 - are there any other free PCB design progs that have autorouting?
 - can eagle (or any other free progs) do auto-placement?
 - is Eagle the best of the free PCB design progs?

Cheers
David