Onshape is a good combination of visual + you can set exact values for things. I’m always happy to try new tools, but I tend to fallback to Blender for artsy stuff and Onshape for more precise parts.

I suck at 3d modeling, so I evaluate tools from a “how much value can a noob get” point of view.

That is definitely an important user perspective. My angle is that I am a professional robotics engineer as well as an open source evangelist. I design a lot of open source CAD and I’d really like it if the CAD package itself was open source as it is important to me to have a community of users who fork my designs. So far open source CAD does not feel adequate as a design tool for me. FreeCAD is conceptually the closest but it seems like the project needs more investment. I recently tried it again and it seems extremely simple compared to Solidworks or Onshape.

Honestly CAD is very complex software and is not well suited to a single engineer working in their hobby time. I think a huge reason Blender has been successful is that they built a sustainable crowd funding system. They currently pull in $166k each month with that system: https://fund.blender.org/

I am pleased to see also Godot engine (a similar type of tool) pulling in over $7k/month (last I checked) on Patreon.

Anyway there is a “business model” for open source projects even if they don’t sell anything. Call it a funding model. I think open source projects need to get a handle on that for anything that exceeds a very small team.

I am trying to build this kind of sustainable funding for my own open source farming robot (link in profile) and I think we’re going to go with Open Collective at least as a front end.

https://opencollective.com/

For fiscal hosting we’ve applied to the Open Collective Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

https://sfconservancy.org/

I think open source CAD really needs a funding plan like this. It’s a very large software project and we’ve seen how Blender and Godot are able to actually get traction and produce a compelling program with resources like that.

Some really interesting thoughts in funding, thankyou. The gotdot and blender examples useful.

Maybe both would be fine, I am just saying the code part is much less useful to me than the visual/parametric editor. Onshape for example has scripts which can do things like generate gears and that is great, but I use scripts for less than 0.1% of my onshape work. The visual/parametric component is what users like me really need. I added it late to my comment but here is an example of one of my recent CAD projects.

https://twitter.com/TLAlexander/status/1450001567088713730

I will check out those videos when I get a chance.