It is a bit of a monopoly. I always respected people who used Rhino, while secretly thinking of them as needlessly contrarian. Now I just respect them.
Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.
Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.
Blender is frustrating as heck to use in comparison.
Also it is 4-up by default and designed around that paradigm. I don't understand how people stand using modeling programs that only have 1 viewport, but they are common enough that I presume everyone gets by.
Personally I also have hope for the interesting hybrids that are continually coming out that are trying to create a seamless pipeline between Revit and Rhino: Google's Flux (which failed), Speckle, RhinoInside.
I also hacked up my own crude solution, which was to continually run a flask server in the background, and then pass json strings between Rhino, Revit, and Jupyter. I do a lot of analysis work (building energy and environmental simulation/optimization), so wanted a solution that gave me access to the scientific python ecosystem.
On the other hand, everyone loves the flexibility, and UX of Rhino/Grasshopper.And (for now?) Rhino has the market cornered on structural, energy, and environmental simulation and optimization plug-ins, just because data-management is so much easier in Grasshopper then Revit's equivalent visual scripting language (Dynamo).
Somewhat unrelated, but Rhino's SDK is really solid and gives a ton of access to the software. It's amazing some of the things that can be done with it, and Rhino as a whole, but at the same time it's producing construction documents that's where the rubber meets the road as far as Architecture is concerned.
Source: Former architecture student and Rhino plugin developer
For automotive and even ship design a lot of studios are using it (even not openly, but in a "secret" manner).
In AEC many students nowadays use it during university. Some offices use it as well, and if only for Grasshopper. GH is a really great piece of software and you can e.g. even use it with Archicad nowadays.
All the big studios might be using Autodesk products in the front, but I know of some who have a senior engineer who has a secret PC in some attic with Rhino installed. If you need more complex tasks to be done the engineer goes to "smoke a cig". ;)