For UI in particular, it’s pretty hard to imagine leaving Figma without auto layout. With the latest news about Drafts, seems you Sketch could pick up some users. Smart Layout is much harder to use overall. For instance, there’s to one place to view or set the margins or spacing. When you drag to adjust spacing I find myself overshooting the value and having to be precise with the mouse.
Figma stole a lot of ideas from Sketch, why not steal some of their good ideas too?
Hey @adammenges
Welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing!
We’ll probably not deviate from the current approach too much anytime soon. That said, we’re always open for individual improvements that may improve Smart Layout.
There’s a lot possible with Smart Layout and if you have any questions or want to achieve something and don’t know how, we’re happy to help.
Personally, I think the behaviour of the smart layout in Sketch feels easier to comprehend most of all for beginners. However, I support @adammenges that the fixed padding options for elements works really smoothly in Figma in comparison to the spacing options in Sketch, which sometimes do not maintain the same values when you interact with items, depending on how you set up all your smart layout options on groups.
But as far as I’ve seen there’s been a request to fix this with negative spacing and I also saw a request somewhere for wrapping content . So although the functionality looks different in Sketch and Figma, with those two requests, Sketch would be pretty close to Figma’s abilities.
Hi! I transitioned from Figma to Sketch a bit over a month ago and agree with @adammenges. Dragging objects to position them correctly is time-consuming. Fixed paddings would create clarity around spacing. Currently, I check my paddings with a rectangle or align to an edge and manually add the padding, but there’s no direct UI feedback.
I don’t think the solution needs to mimic Figma, but giving users control over padding and clear system feedback would be helpful and save me a lot of time. Really agree that it would be great if Sketch had an easier padding adjustment feature!
When searching for workarounds I’ve seen people adding rectangles as guides to align to - but that seems pretty time-consuming too - Is there a better way to do this in Sketch today?
Hi there @Lollosk,
Welcome to the Forum! It’s great to see you here and great timing too! We’re currently working to bring Auto Layout to Sketch and our Product Team is requesting feedback! By the way, I agree 100% with all you mention here: more control, visual feedback, create our own solution.
Check this post and please feel free to say what’s a must, what you need and what you expect from this new feature! 
Call for feedback: “Auto Layout”
Now, regarding what you mentioned about visual feedback, Sketch has tools that can help with positioning and paddings. I ran into the same issue as you: how to set my paddings with precision and I use these two things in Sketch. This is what I use:
I made this demo video, I hope it helps:
Hi! Thanks for telling me about ⌥ (Option) it has really made things a lot quicker for me. 
Although I wish I could use another shortcut for this since I sometimes accidentally drag the layer to adjust, but end up duplicating it since I have option pressed.