Help with substituting through hole with SMD

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Race to the bottom! Why are so concerned about absolute minimum trace width? If you are making 2,000,000 of something, the cost of copper and plating materials might come into play, as we saw in low cost mass produced goods. In the course of my 70 years I have seen the evolutionary transition from point to point components all the way to now. The worst part of that was when being really cheap was job one. I saw hundreds of items made with the narrowest possible traces fail in service thanks to blown up melted traces. They are also far more difficult to do repairs on, even with intact traces, because of the poor adhesion to the board. If you are making an ultra miniature smart phone or laptop/tablet circuit, you have to go small, and watch Louis Rossman make a video about repairing the shitty thin traces and running 32 gauge wire jumpers.. For anything else, stop racing to the bottom.. try to design and build with the idea of low resistance instead of the absolute minimum possible where traces are one breath away from fusable links.

Standard pcb fabrication process begins with boards fully cladded with copper. Then etching ie a subtractive process.
You can recover the etched copper from the etchant but in terms of cost it's marginal in a lot of cases.
Also cost of etchant consumption to think about as JR points to.

fwiw a decent pcb shouldn't have quality issues with 0.3mm traces wrt adhesion to (typically) FR4 board substrate.
Electronic design wrt heat / voltage drop etc is a different design matter.
 
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