>> Yes, SolidWorks is easy to pick up and use with no training. FreeCAD is not; it requires dedicated time to learn, following tutorials, and at least a few throw-away projects to gain proficiency. There are a lot of easy mistakes that can sabotage progress, and multiple ways of doing things that are different under the hood, where those differences aren't obvious, including some ways that are bad and wrong. But there's a lot it can do, and it gets better all the time.
> My goal was to produce the design, not to master design tool. The less time I spent the better is my ROI. I have neither time nor desire to dedicate myself to be a master of particular tool.
This is actually how a lot of the "Niche language $FOO is a superior language" arguments go.
That defence is used for $SUPERIOR_LANGUAGE too. Look at the large numbers of devs who feel that the extra cognitive load needed to learn (for example) monads is worth it.
Or the large number of posts explaining Rusts syntactical mess as "It's doing a complicated job so the interface has to be complicated."
Hell, nevermind languages, that argument gets thrown across the entire tech stack - the submission yesterday about complexity had a number of posters who felt that there's no additional complexity in using Kubernetes even for an application that never needs to scale horizontally!
Is it any surprise then that we see the same argument for different tech, even though it's a clearly invalid argument 99% of the time.
What's not ok is denying that failure and gaslighting users into self-blame while preventing trying something better.
Forgive me, I wasn't attempting to imply that the practice is okay.
I was just pointing out that the practice is normal, across the entire tech stack.
It is common for people to reject high-cognitive load stuff, and at this point it is common to have others jump in with "they're dinosaurs resistant to change", "Every $TECH has a learning curve" or similar stuff.
CATIA is rubbish. But everything else is way worse.
I did not need to assemble the airplane / LHC so this particular benefit you are describing is / was completely irrelevant to me.