Comment by ginko

Well, like I said: From open tools I had available b123d was the one that relatively quickly (within a weekend from picking up the tool) allowed me to mock up something to the point where I became confident enough to keep going.

I tried to do that with FreeCAD without too much success. I assume someone proficient with it could probably crank out the whole thing within an afternoon, but not me.

I'm sure professional tools are many times more productive, but you need to spend thousands of dollars and presumably months if not years of training to become proficient in them.

And admittedly that's more of a weird hangup of mine but to me it also sort-of misses the point to use a proprietary tool for building an open source project. No one without the tool could open the source files and make modifications.