Comment by darksim905

I am a very basic beginner/familiar with tools like Solidworks that have every feature under the sun, but I never really took a class or learned beyond experiencing it at work for a company that made cosmetic packaging. What you're saying is somewhat right, because unless you're a trained engineer who even understands what the hell GD & T means, yeah, you're going to be confused as hell from a design perspective.

CAD/CAM software with Cartesian planes are already confusing as is for most folks. Once I started watching some videos discussing tolerances and such from an engineer perspective, the layout, tooling and concepts made a lot more sense to me.

At that point, it's essentially understanding the intention of the tools and if you're performing additive manufacturing or subtractive. A lot of CAD/CAM software is geared toward machine shops and setups and mindsets like that and not necessarily 3D printer-esque communities. I think these solutions are great for the 3D crowd and not so much the engineer.

There are some in-between things that break the mold and do things in unique ways for people who are product designers like Rhino. The node editing in that is so cool. I look forward to seeing what more people can do with AI now and scripting.