Tried FreeCAD, gave up in frustration after I drew a second sketch on the face of an object and no matter what I did it wouldn't extrude.
After that went poorly I'd just picked up Fusion 360 about a month ago and have been doing pretty well with that. Whoops.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation 1: https://www.opencascade.com
So, you could implement a BREP object along with primitives to convert it to a mesh and it would work just fine. There are already objects such as particles, metaballs, hairs, NURBS, splines, and so on.
So the current Blender modeling options are isomorphic to those of a BREP modeller. All it would need are some more constraints.
What is lacking, is the parametric history.
Obviously that would be pocket change to the Blender Foundation, but if enough people did then maybe it would be worth it. I'd wager there a fairly big group of people like me who need somewhat decent CAD for hobby use. And if those who can afford to pay put that money towards Blender, we could make it better overall for those who can't.
Never used it myself but there are some CAD tool addons you can try -- also they seem to have incorporated some 'hard modeling' features which, I would imagine, aren't that far from the CADiverse.
Also, unless they worked on it (semi)recently, the NURBS in blender is a bit of a trainwreck which everyone was scared to even look in its direction.
If SolveSpace doesn't pan out for me I'll try OpenSCAD next, but I gather there are some issues with that modeling approach where fillets/chamfers are much more challenging to create than they are in a graphical modeller.
However, if you want that sort of operations you would probably be better off with cadquery, which is basically the engine behind FreeCAD, with a really powerful Python interface. It has native support for face operations like fillets.
Just to check if any Mac developers wander into the comments - is it possible to build and run software on Mojave without an Apple Developer subscription, or is that now an absolute requirement due to the notarization system?
It's fairly new, so currently has very little traffic. But if you've got good questions, can give good answers, or have interesting projects to share it would be great to have you subscribe.
a) First, nuking the hobbyist/amateur users asphyxiates your future pipeline. These people will now use and invest their time in open source alternatives. Free open source alternatives that have downsides, over time will no longer have downsides.
b) Your big corporate customers will independently finance the development of those open source platforms.
As someone who first used Blender when it was a year or two old, and then didn't look at it again until 2.8: wow, they have done a damn good job. It isn't Maya or Modo, and misses some unique use cases, but it is amazingly easy to use. Learning curve from start to working animated model in game engine was hours not days.
If Blender is any indication, the open source software tools are on a trajectory to be a lot better than the commercial stuff given enough time and focus.
I don't know much about CAD requirements, but it looks like there are a few tools available already and efforts underway:
The CAD addons for blender are helpful for doing some more precise drawing actions (like finding the intersection point of two edges, which blender doesn't normally give you), but they're still fundamentally in a destructive mesh workflow. You have a pile of vertices/edges/faces, you do some editing, and you have a different pile of verticies/edges/faces. There's some stuff doable with non-destructive modifiers, but they're for very limited specific tasks.