But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives, even you count in FreeCAD. It makes business sense for Autodesk to keep grabbing as much money as they could, so they can: 1) earn money, 2) add more features into their product to raise the bar higher. It's the same logic behind Adobe and maybe Microsoft, Apple, Google etc.
The good news is, at least you don't have to pay for Autodesk 3ds Max now since Blender. Maybe it could be more productive if we convert our hatreds towards greedy commercial software into supports (donate etc) towards free and opensource alternatives (FreeCAD etc in this case).
So maybe when next time someone wanted to say "fuck Autodesk", send $5 to FreeCAD instead (https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php).
What about SolidWorks?
I’m an EE who only needs to use 2D CAD occasionally. Back in the early days I got myself a copy of AutoCAD LT (my company used AutoCAD so it made sense to learn the same tools that out draftsmen used). I developed strong muscle memory for the AutoCAD commands, and it’s not really worth my time and hassle to learn a new tool given how infrequently I need it. Some years back I stumbled on DraftSight which was free / low-cost and was a UI clone of AutoCAD. They eventually switched to a subscription model. I’m not a big fan of SASS, but when it’s not an exorbitant price, needed for my professional work, and the software generates industry standard files that I can use with other packages if I want to get off the SASS merry-go-round, I’m not strongly opposed, either.