If you know folk in the industry - I'd be keen to know what work needs funding to be enough to move from Autodesk to OpenSCAD or similar
Happy to chat more if you're interested in it.
Just connected to another via this same thread.
I do wonder if there's enough engineers that started in the 00's and are now almost retired looking to work on righting some wrongs in our industry :D
That's a different take on age discrimination in hiring than I'm used to seeing!
Open source software historically treats users as an afterthought (or worse makes really terrible attempts at courting them like GIMP).
Different CAD suites use different terms and have radically different interfaces. There's a lot of (un)learning to do. Go fillet something in Fusion then try to do the same in FreeCAD. Not only is the interface ever so slightly different than Fusion, you have to navigate a minefield of bugs and limitations in FreeCAD. Yikes.
But by comparing Autodesk (presumably Fusion and not e.g. Buzzsaw or Maya) to OpenSCAD you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison. OpenSCAD is a thin wrapper around a CAD programming language, it's an entirely different than something like SolidWorks or Fusion.
The case for hobbyists is a bit different as they're often more willing to try something like FreeCAD that's missing a bunch of features or makes them far more tedious to implement. Try dealing with parameters in FreeCAD. Or, better yet, recreate this: