Hi,
My employer has been a PADS customer since day 1, and I've used all their versions, including the current ones offered by Mentor Graphics. PADS, IMHO, has never been particularly great software - quirky to use, and not intuitive - but it gets the job done. A couple of years ago I advocated that we get Cadsoft Eagle software for some of our smaller 'quickie' type projects. After the very short learning curve, and minimal parts creation (Eagle has pretty extensive libraries available), the Eagle software has now almost completely replaced PADS for our PCB design work. The only time we use PADS now is for maintaining our legacy products! Like you, we assumed that our extensive PADS libraries would be impossible to replace/replicate, but in reality we found this was not the case. If the part is not readily available (in Eagle, or via a 3rd party source), then new parts creation is trivial in Eagle, and should not be feared!! Mostly, it's just finding a predefined (standard) package outline, and then assigning it to your specific part, but even when you need to create a package outline, it's no big deal.
Lastly, newer software offers so many more useful features than the old stuff, that it really is worth the time/effort to obtain/learn the latest offerings! Ha, ha, besides you saif you are retired, so what else do you have to do
John