The real problem is that BREP CAD kernels are hard. A few of proprietary kernels dominate the scene: Parasolid powers NX, SolidWorks, Fusion, and Onshape, while ACIS (owned by Dassault) is used by Inventor and BricsCAD. Catia uses Dassault's own CGM kernel. The open-source world relies mostly on OpenCASCADE, which is unfortunately a lot less capable than any of these.
Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. You can push either kernel to its limits if you try hard enough, but OCC hits that ceiling much sooner. So any CAD tool built on top of it inherits that ceiling too.
> Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint.
A long time ago I interviewed at one of the large CAD companies. I remember getting an office tour and the person showing me around pointed into a corner with six desks and said "that is the team that does fillets".
Open source tools can handle some cases, but to handle the full complexity of real world problems is a huge extra step that I doubt they will manage any time soon.
Were their desks shaped like this? https://www.staples.com/bush-business-furniture-cubix-48w-co...
That's one of the real problems. The other real problem is an active resistance to UI improvement simply because another CAD package did something similar.
FreeCAD doesn't resist those comparisons anymore. They happen regularly. Implementing change is just slow, and purely copying how xyz cad built their UI isn't always compatible with FreeCAD, so a lot of careful consideration goes into things before concepts from other software get implemented. Not to mention that developers seem to really dislike doing frontend work.
Aaaaah! No! You're doing it too! I am not talking about copying how xyz cad built their UI. I am not talking about consciously implementing concepts from other software. I'm talking about this crazy tendency to assume that the reason someone wants UI feature X is because xyz cad does it, not because it's a natural, intuitive thing to want to do. Natural, intuitive things tend to get independently invented; more than once I've made a suggestion and had "this isn't Fusion 360, you know" thrown back at me, despite the fact I've never used F360 to know what comparison they're making.
I wasn't implying you were doing that. I don't play the 'this isn't fusion or xyz cad' argument when someone brings a suggestion. I'm only stating that not every idea will work properly in the context of FreeCAD, but comparisons are considered when such suggestions are made.
The thing you are complaining about is the immediate dismissal the forum used to shoot back at people with ideas. Most likely a conditioned (and very toxic) response from receiving a lot of equally non-constructive feedback using things like F360 as their litmus.
Either way, there is the Design Working Group which evaluates ideas and feedback with a fair lens about what will work in context of FreeCAD and what is feasible to implement without causing unnecessary disruption to existing users. It is a complex social paradox to deal with.
Do you think this is why CAD software UI/UX is often so clunky? The kernels are complicated and error-prone given the incalculable number of edge-cases, which puts error reporting at a disadvantage, leads to counter-intuitive feature wizards with some having way too many parameters and others being very single-purpose?