> Now it's great, but if you're going to copy features like this, please make sure to document them so that people trying to learn how to use your tool without the requisite historical perspective don't get frustrated.
Interesting. I started with AutoCAD version 1.1. This is pre-PC days. It ran on an S-100 8086 system with an 8087 math coprocessor card, a specialized graphics card, a VT-100 terminal (the real thing, not a terminal emulator running as software one a computer), 640K of RAM disk and the CP/M operating system.
The right-to-left and left-to-right selection idioms have been part of my design "DNA" for decades. I can see how this could be confusing, yet, to be frank, I don't think it is that hard to discover.
That said, yes, absolutely positively I do agree with you in that complex tools have been doing a substandard job of communicating state, commands, options, features and commands to users. On the electronics design front I use Altium Designer. Altium have done a horrible job with the latest version (21.x.x). It is hard to list the bugs the program has, the UI/UX mess they have created, the lack of discoverability and, in general, the tangled rats-nest the software has become. Much like AutoCAD, I have been using Altium for a long time. It is hard to want to support a company through annual license renewals when they clearly don't seem to care about users.
For me, by far, the best user experiences have come from Solidworks and Fusion 360. I have far more experience with SW. The program has improved with time and the UI experience is great.