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FontForge is open source, cross-platform and fairly featureful; that is something to be grateful about but I can assure you from first hand experience that yes the commercial competitors are indeed much better. If you have macOS you check out some of those yourself, they have long enough trials - Glyphs(/Mini) and RoboFont. That said I’m most excited about the upcoming generation, for example the web based fontra.xyz etc.

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FontForge is cross platform, and I've generally found I can beat the UI into submission easily enough. However the mac builds are a bit of a minefield and they only publish Intel binaries. Trying to DIY an ARM build was an exercise in frustration. They use some seemingly abandoned alternative to Apple's otool, and the whole process depends on Python <= 3.11.

Also open source (but definitely more assertive about asking for money) is BirdFont. I've installed it but not spent much time trying to use it.

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