Well, I took it as a reading comprehension problem
That's my approach to it. If there is a good comprehensive guide to using FreeCad, I have yet to find it. I was playing with the Arch (architecture) workbench recently. The wiki tutorial is from version 0.14, poor match to the current tools. I've tried several of the youtube videos but they are hard to use as reference material. But the alternative, using fusion360, isn't attractive either.
I don't think FreeCad has hit the point yet where Kicad is, enough community support to hit critical mass. Not that Kicad is perfect.
FreeCAD is ok for hacking around, and mostly good enough for my use. It shouldn't be confused with a commercial product though, it's not professional enough, and there are still quite a few issues with it.
Excuse my little rant...
For one thing, only using a single core these days, well that's not how it should be done. Many computers, including my laptop, have access to hundreds, if not thousands of GPU cores to do work, (1920 GPU cores) never mind the 15 other idle CPU cores on my i7. Seems absurd to only use one single solitary core for computation. You and I both know that writing massively parallel code is very hard, but even some simple stuff could be done to make things a lot snappier. There has to be some bottlenecks that could be rewritten to make them faster by using parallelism.
We don't often use real helical threads in our drawing, why? Because we (FreeCAD) are stuck in the stone age using a single core... And lets not talk about the topological naming problem, or easy chamfering, or whatever. For hobbyist use FreeCAD is mostly ok. If I had a business, I wouldn't consider it at all, it just isn't mature enough to bet my business on.
This is not to say that other CAD packages are great, but they are quite a bit more full featured and mature. Most are a bit more expensive. Some are free now, or partially crippled, or will be crippled when times are tough and the companies need to bring up their margins. But generally, they are superior performing offerings, which is why businesses use them. FreeCAD is pretty good, but it doesn't perform at professional levels, at least in my limited perspective.
Rant is over.
On the other hand, with FreeCAD, I can post on a forum, and get the personal attention of a developer. There is value to that. Still, the code is not quite finished.
When I see what others can do on HM and see their renderings, I am left drooling. I have no idea how to get FreeCAD to that level. Have to go reading a lot on rendering, because I know very little about it.
KiCAD has plenty of quirks. One of them is a pathological aversion to auto-routing. According to many there, only real men route. For crying out loud, I used rules based auto-routers professionally in 1985 for a first pass success. Yes it wasn't perfect, but using it was 3 times faster than hand routing estimates, even after fixing a few weirdly routed nets. It's like they are the only male bastion there... Got lambasted there for asking about auto-routing. Like I would enjoy hand routing, if I only got into it. Blechh, yes, it's problem solving, but I'd rather be doing something else, like using my completed board, three weeks earlier. Libraries, at least in KiCAD V6 are weird, don't know if that is much better in V7. Other than that, KiCAD is pretty good, been able to do most of what I need.
