Not OP, but I've been using FreeCAD for hobby projects for 8 years and even though I usually do achieve the results I want, the "monitor punching UX issues" are absolutely real. I'd love for FreeCAD to succeed the way Blender did, but the project either lacks people with UX expertise or funds to sponsor such people.
I tried it this year. Not in too much depth, but I tried Fusion and FreeCAD for the first time this year for 3D printing and found I was getting much further much faster on Fusion.
I'm sure I could grind harder and learn more and make FreeCAD work, but I'm not sure why I'd bother.
If all you're looking to do is produce a design the quickest way possible, then sure Fusion often wins. Just as there was a time where buying Maya made more sense than using Blender. But, FreeCAD offers other niceties, like being able to work offline, using an open file format, performant non-web UI, generally avoiding vendor lock-in. And Autodesk already did a major rug pull with Fusion360 licensing once.
I mostly design functional 3D prints. I've found FreeCAD 1.0 fixed most of the annoyances I ran into and I'm pretty productive with it. But, I didn't come into it with an expectation of a SolidWorks or Fusion clone. I learned the tool with its own idioms and it seems pretty straightforward to me. It's not perfect by any means and I've run into the occasional bug. To that end, I've found reporting bugs with reproducible steps goes a long way to getting things fixed.
I'm not sure what it is about CAD in particular, but I find everyone wants the "Blender of the CAD world" while skipping over the decade of investment it took to get Blender where it is. For a long time, discussions about Blender were dominated by complaints about the UX. If we didn't have folks willing to work past a hit to productivity in order to make an investment into Blender, we wouldn't have the amazing open source tool we have today. FreeCAD has all the expectations of a high quality open source CAD tool with hardly any of the investment. Just getting people on /r/freecad to file issues is surprisingly challenging.
By all means, if you're happy with Fusion and don't mind the licensing, have at it. I'm sure there's functionality in there without an equivalent in FreeCAD. I'd personally rather not have my designs locked up in Fusion and see FreeCAD as the best option for me, even if it suffers from the challenges of open source UI design.
No arguement that fusion isn’t better and easier to learn. Their licensing and changes to their hobbyist offering were no longer tenable for me which prompted my change. I was pleasantly surprised at how well I was able to work in freecad after a few youtube videos.
