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.
> 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.