> astrometrica is still the one to go for (as an amateur).

Not just amateurs but professionals use it too.
I am not aware of a "professional" software that can do the
job better than Astrometrica, regarding targeted follow-up
of faint minor planets (track and stack).

I guess that when you imply that professionals use different
software, you mean the automated software used in "survey mode",
i.e. the one that the NEO surveys use for "discovery". For
targeted follow-up however they often use Astrometrica (see e.g.
Rob McNaught at SSS).

Interactive software like Astrometrica requires more work on the
human side, but for targeted follow-up of important objects it is
better than fully automated software ecause you are inside the loop
and you can therefore manage the quality control in real-time, e.g. by
rejecting bad frames, frames where the object is involved with field
stars or with image artefacts etc.

Fully automated software has a much higher output in terms of
astrometry lines per hour but you have no direct control over the result
like you have it in Astrometrica.

Both types of software are rather complementary, not competing.
Many years ago I proposed an "Astrometrica for Surveys". Making
Astrometrica scriptable would have been a huge effort however and
I understand that Herbert never had the time to make this happen.
Meanwhile I also think that it would not have been worth the effort.
Because for "survey mode" operations you have PinPoint and SExtractor.
And both will give better results for that type of work, because they are
optimized for automated work. While Astrometrica is optimized for
handcrafted high-precision astrometry and could never compete with
them. Its PSF fitting to all image sources makes it relatively slow
and while this type of centroiding gives superior results when the
SNR is good, it gives poorer results when you work at very low SNR,
as you typically do it in the discovery game.

R.