I don't know if you can really get away without learning general things about CAD systems if you want to make complex things, because those general things are so influential on the existence and design of real world objects.
It's like saying "but I don't really want to learn about different programming languages or software design, because I only want to write apps for iPhone."
If you want to make very simple objects and not learn deeper concepts, use TinkerCAD. It's fine. Weirdly competent in places; people pull off crazy stuff. It uses a simple physical world model.
Beyond that, you need more abstract tools. Ultimately you have to decide whether you want to exist within the (shifting) free plan limitations of a commercial cloud package, spend money on something like Alibre Atom3D, pay the cloud firms, or use something open source.
I'm not sure if it should be surprising that the open source systems are more of a commitment.
FreeCAD (main branch) has one fundamental limitation which is being mitigated -- the topological naming issues -- and some smaller issues to do with fillets/chamfers, but apart from that is a disorganised-but-competent, open source workbench-based system.
And the tradeoffs are not straightforward. This is less like Photoshop vs GIMP and more like ArcGIS vs QGIS. Is ArcGIS initially more coherent? Yes, allegedly. Is it universally more powerful? No.
FreeCAD is really a lot like QGIS, IMO.
You can learn QGIS, and when you learn it, you might decide that the freedoms and flexibility it offers are worth the pain. Or you might front up the cash for ArcGIS.
100 hours of watching videos and trying to make something and not getting anywhere vs a few hours.
The problem was not about getting away with it without learning general principles.
Of course, those 100 hours taught me about principles that were applicable to OnShape as well, so it’s not entirely apples to apples.
BTW, the issue was never TNP. It was everything else. The absurd separation between Parts and bodies and whatnot. The 5 different assembly benches, none of them good. The crashes. The way you need pixel precision to grab a vertex or an edge. And if some operation cuts a part in multiple disjoint pieces, only one survives.
My wife told me to stop doing what I was doing because I ended the weekend with way more frustration than the work week.
I've not watched 100 hours of videos at all and I've made and printed fully parametric designs with four variants driven by two configuration tables. I don't think it's that hard to learn.
> The absurd separation between Parts and bodies and whatnot.
Again, Parts/Bodies, it's confusing (and Part Design should be called "Single Body Design" IMO) but there are videos that explain the difference.
(I gather it comes from CATIA, and CATIA users are comfortable. Either way you don't have to use both; it's possible to never touch Part Design and do absolutely everything.)
I don't think I got it initially but now the difference is useful. There could be more work to allow non-Part-Design Parts to be wrapped in Part Design bodies. There's a macro (pdwrapper) for this, and Realthunder's branch built it in.
There could be better explanations on how Part Design works, how you build a Part Design Body from existing Parts and how you later combine them.
> The 5 different assembly benches, none of them good.
I feel this pain and I mostly avoided it by just using static placement. There's a new built-in Assembly workbench with a sophisticated solver that is being added in 1.0 which will land in the next two to three months (and is already in 0.22-dev and Ondsel 2024.2). I am going to dive in with that.
> The crashes.
Not a problem I have on the Mac at all now; 0.21 is really stable. Though startup crashes are common on Linux due to W****nd and the complexities of compiling support for it. The Flatpak appears to solve those. Ish.
> The way you need pixel precision to grab a vertex or an edge.
There is a preference setting (a newish one) that makes edge selection rougher/easier.
> And if some operation cuts a part in multiple disjoint pieces, only one survives.
Only in Part Design, which (in mainstream FreeCAD) is concerned with only one contiguous object. In fact, that operation actually fails. (A Body can be started with a compound of multiple pieces, but the first feature has to join them).
RealThunder's branch can support Bodies made of separate solids, and maybe that will come to mainstream once the TNP fix, which is a prerequisite, is in.
Outside of Part Design, objects split as you'd expect.
I don't think FreeCAD is perfect. That would be silly. But none of the "free" plans of the commercial cloud packages are right for me.
I've invested several hours already in trying to learn FreeCAD and achieved nothing. Its a hot mess that desperately needs a new UI.