I've got a board design with a number of replicated sections, and I need to quickly churn out another board with some of the sections removed. My E-CAD guy, due to the constraints of his tools, can't just chop out the extra sections and scrunch the result together. I'm looking for advice on how to explain this to someone more familiar with mechanical CAD, where you don't have to deal with complications like netlists and schematics.
As a software guy, I could probably accomplish this by exporting the design files into some text representation and running a clever editor macro, then importing back into the native CAD format. But I'm not expecting that to be in the toolbox of a CAD person, who's going to be more graphic-oriented and will find text representations alien. (In contrast, my first E-CAD system, ca. 1980, was a text-based system written in LISP that "compiled" text schematic descriptions into printed graphical schematics. I used a line editor on a printing terminal, and a pad of graph paper to figure out layouts.)
I'd also be interested in hearing of E-CAD programs that can effectively handle replicated circuitry (perhaps by creating template "stamps"), and that's affordable by a tiny startup.