Let me introduce you to some 0.3mm spaced connectors we use some time, Marra. :-)
My typical design rules are 13/12 (trace width/spacing) for utterly generic protoboards (huge parts), 8/7 for not-quite-so-generic test boards (e.g., some surface mount parts, small number of parts total), and 6/6 for most "real" boards (reasonable number of parts, plenty of fine pitch stuff here and there). If you toss fine-pitch BGAs or 0.3mm connectors into the mix, sometimes it has to shrink to 5/5.
All of this is moot for controlled impedance traces, of course.
I think what he meant was that all the mainstream PCB tools out there will let you group various nets into difference "classes" and then assign widths by class. Hence, if you change your mind about the trace width of a given class, it's just a couple of mouse clicks to change every instance of that class. You still have to go and fix any design rule violations you introduced, of course, but it's a lot faster than having to click every track and change it manually.
For initial placement, I've never found auto-placers of much use... nor have I met any professional (meaning paid) layout tech who has either.
I do very much like auto-gate/pin swapping, that some tools support. (On the other hand, these days there tends to be less "jellybean" logic floating around a board, and what is now often ends up in a TinyLogic-type part, so this is no longer used as often as it once was.)
I just use the usual algin to left/right/center/top/bottom edge features that pretty much all tools have on occasion. Most tools (but probably not Marra's?) will also let you group a bunch of parts together so that they can be moved/rotated/etc. together as one large object.
I find myself using 25mils and 5mils most commonly. For metric boards, it's often something like 0.5mm and 0.1mm.
For low-speed digital boards, this is OK. For high-speed digital there are plenty of other critical routes (clocks, typically) that you'd potentially want to do by hand first; for RF there's much more hand-routing involved because very few mainstream PCB package "know" anything about proper RF design.
I have found the part placement tools are absolutely vital. This is one of those things that computers do much better and quicker than a human. I really could not do without this on larger boards.
I first set the unmoveable components to where they should be and set then as unmovable. Then I use the auto-autoplacer. I sometimes just let it run all night on large PCB's. I usually finish off with a swap-autoplacing run which is very quick for big improvements.
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