Autocad is not really a good example of a 'pro' tool in the sense that it would necessarily signal quality. Sure it's old and its DWG format is the market leading proprietary black box blob format. It does not have any features though that would make the design for he house to be of better quality than with any other drafting tool.

Revit is probably closer to what you meant, but I have no idea how the quality of the drawing tool would affect the quality of the architects output.

Construction design tools are all more or less old and crufty. For the love of god, someone please disrupt the industry.

The domain is shallow but complex. Open source is probably not the answer - but open tools most certainly won't hurt.

You’re right on but I would like to add in data interoperability. Revit is the standard and the 2700/year is nothing compared to paying 25-50/hour to retrain employees. But Revit doesn’t even open its own files from the past. If you built a building in Revit 2015, you need that exact version to keep using the model for maintenance and repairs. We all have a cascade of versions from our first project to the current year. Further, integrating structural and mechanical engineering into the BIM process is great but all three firms (or more for larger or more complex projects) must be on the same version to share files.

Insanity.

I now use ArchiCAD which is focused on Open IFC as the interchange format. It’s not perfect but it’s a good step. Once data interchange works then mixing in more specialized tools for certain tasks becomes easier so FreeCAD wouldn’t have to compete with the entire Revit toolset all at once.

That is not correct. You can open old files with a newer version of Revit, it will upgrade your file to the current version you are using (though not always a smooth process on large files), what you can’t do is open a newer files with an older version of Revit, regardless if it’s one or five versions different. This, for me, is absolutely wrong for a software company to do, only so they can keep you on subscription! Still waiting for the “Revit killer” app, but sadly FreeCAD is not it.

I'm genuinely interested - do you (or a firm you know) work that way or do you keep models siloed to their Revit years? I left Revit in 2017 so I'm not sure if the upgrade model features now work well enough that standard practice is to move forward with each new version. And I'm also ready for a Revit (and Archicad and Vectorworks and also drawing as architectural products) killer... Is anyone working on one that you know of?

To clarify: I didn't mean to imply that free as in beer part of software freedom is important in that case.

My arguments for non-subscription based software for architects (but in general all professionals that heavily rely on software) are rather along the lines: if you are banned or support for the service you use stops you are basically left holding the baby.

Its not true for locally run programs (unless they have some expiration keys or something) whether commercial or free. The former are even better since you don't need to worry about eg. breaking changes if the foss tool uses version control system (you can always git revert to release that worked with what you need to do).

I only argue that leaning on paid subscription/service-based software for key part of your professional work/craft is asking for trouble.