The sad and alarming state of circuit design tools in Linux

So, for fun I'm playing around with microcontrollers. I want to enter a schematic for the circuit I'm designing.

I tried out Eagle CAD, but there is no symbol for the microcontroller I'm using (the Atmel ATtiny2313). There are some user-contributed libraries for Atmel parts, but I don't see that part anywhere. Bleh.

[Aside: the ATtiny2313 is only an insanely popular and widely-used part, which has only been available for 3 years now. I can totally understand why it's not in any readily-available part library.]

So, I try out gschem from the gEDA package. Free software is always better, of course. The ATtiny2313 part isn't in the library, but I find it at gedasymbols.org. Yay.

Unhappily, I don't see the ICM7212 in either the built-in library, or at gedasymbols.org.

Blech. OK, how easy is it to add a new symbol? It's a plain, boring old 40 pin DIP. How hard could this be?

Well, it wasn't as easy as I had hoped. The state of the art is described in a tutorial. Here's a brief synopsis:

1. Download a text file and an OpenOffice spreadsheet file. (The text file is not, as far as I can see, mentioned again in the tutorial.)
   
2. Edit the spreadsheet to fill in hundreds of mysterious labels.
3. Enter the function names,pin types, etc. for each pin.
4. Save the spreadsheet as comma-separated text.
5. Run the CSV through a python script, which creates a schematic file.
6. Edit the schematic file using gschem. (Why? Wish I knew.)
   
7. Save it as a symbol file.
   

Just trying to read the tutorial makes me want to vomit with rage.

The icing on the cake is this: the spreadsheet has pre-defined spaces for only 16 pins. I'm trying to create a 40-pin part. Being a programmer, I'm not going to sit there are fill in cells one at a time (17, 18, 19, etc...). I'll just define a spreadsheet formula that will generate these pin numbers for me, and copy them into as many cells as needed. The author of the spreadsheet, helpfully, disabled support for formulas in the entire spreadsheet. I honestly didn't even know this was possible!

Someone please just shoot me, or at least jab me with something sharp.

There seems to be a simpler approach, djboxsym, which looks like it dispenses with some of the unnecessary complexity.