I have yet to use AD a lot, so I am not sure how it works there. In CorelDraw it is not working any good so what I do there is use its Powerclip feature to fill the content with manually tiled objects of size. I do that rather than do pattern, and then pattern fill because of the poor adjustability of the latter that I simply do the powerclip route as it takes same/similar effort and at least let me adjust the content.
Powerclip is when you turn one object into a container of kind, and the content can be wider than the object but the excess isn't shown.
It isn't a replacement to a well made vector fill of course.