What I do have an issue with is new users that try and have problems and immediately start whinging that “FreeCAD isn’t like what I know. And it needs to be like my favorite” Those are the lazy people that can’t be bothered to learn something new. And they should either expend the effort to learn or go back to whatever they were using

I think that’s fair, but most criticisms of FreeCAD from people coming from other CAD packages rather fall into your latter category that you mention here:

But if you have given FreeCAD, (or ANYTHING new in life), an honest try and you can’t get the hang of it or simply don’t like it.

I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing in principle, just on what we perceive as the common criticisms of FreeCAD. Normally, I’ve seen people from other CAD programs get frustrated at limitations within FreeCAD or needing to work around bugs in ways that slow them down. For example, FreeCAD previously was unable to cope with multiple geometries being contained in a single sketch (I believe 1.0 now supports multiple extrudes from different sketch regions, but previously FreeCAD would throw an error), which made modeling less efficient for those coming from programs like Solidworks where this feature exists. Throw other issues like toponaming into the mix and it’s no surprise people from other CAD programs tried learning it, got frustrated (since their baseline was better than what FreeCAD could offer) and moved on.

I agree that criticizing FreeCAD for having different workflows than other CAD programs is a bit silly, though. I don’t really care what the exact workflow is as long as it 1) works and 2) is fast, and for me FreeCAD 1.0 (and previously Realthunder’s branch) ticks all the boxes there.

I appreciate the respectful discussion!

I do think the point about all CAD packages having failure paths is a little overblown. Yes, you can definitely get proprietary CAD to break but in my experience (at least with Solidworks and Fusion), it usually requires much more complex parts than FreeCAD parts. Post 1.0 the situation is definitely better though.

You’re right that users should try following best practices from day one, but realistically most users are not going to learn everything correctly automatically. They might use an out of date tutorial, or might have just learned by tinkering themselves.

The point I was trying to make was that because FreeCAD operates differently than other CAD programs do to one another and because it’s generally a bit more brittle and demanding of the user, I can’t say I blame anyone for not wanting to switch to it if they already have a CAD program they’re proficient with. You could call it being lazy, but from a practical standpoint there isn’t necessarily a ton to gain for a relatively large amount of time investment required to be capable of using it.

I really hope FreeCAD improves enough one day in the new user experience department. I love the software and have been using it as my tool of choice for years now, but evidently not everyone thinks it’s worth the time investment.

I’ll mention this fix is aimed at mitigating toponaming primarily for sketch attachment. Some features still struggle with toponaming, namely chamfers and fillets. But in any case, it’s a massive step forward and makes FreeCAD much easier to recommend! Until now I’ve been using Realthunder’s fork since toponaming was such a headache to resolve manually.

I think that’s a little unfair. The bigger issue IMO is that FreeCAD doesn’t quite share the same workflow as other (proprierary) CAD packages, so someone coming from proprietary CAD also needs to unlearn habits that were previously fine but now potentially harmful. For example, adding chamfers and fillets in FreeCAD pretty much should only be done at the end to avoid toponaming issues, which is less of an issue in other packages.