Nice.
I'm an over-40 year old wannabe engineer too, except I didn't get as far as you on my little pet project: designing a 'universal' gear, based on professor Jack Phillips' work "General Spatial Involute Gearing." So far I can model the basic helicoids in Siemens NX, such that they touch along the ISA (Intermediate Screw Axis) which passes through the CDL (Center Distance Line) in between the gear axes. I have no clue how to proceed from there with actual involute teeth.
My idea is to at some point write an NX Open script/module, which takes in various parameters (like selecting the shaft/axes vectors; inputs ratio, pitch, etc.) and spits out something structured like my model.
Good luck with that. NX is such a pain to use compared to other alternatives (commercial and free/open source). NX Open being even more painful because it's basically 90% guesswork.
I love NX (10-12), it feels very intuitive to me and it's absolutely rock solid compared to Inventor, Solid Edge, and SolidWorks, and it seems like it could run performantly on a literal potato (currently an offline Windows Server 2022 qube with 8GB RAM and 2 vCPUs, no GPU passthrough).
If only it were free for minors to play with as a toy, beats Minecraft as a builder!
Version 10-12 is 10-ish years ago. They switched to yearmonth (e.g. 2604) release names long ago.
Let's just say things changed since then.
There is also a difference between intuitive and familiar.
I learned to CAD on Fusion 360 with no formal education and it just worked. I can use FreeCAD sufficiently well to be productive (it really has become better over the years). I tried OnShape and just started working. I like using OpenSCAD and CadQuery...
... but I still struggle to get spline extrusions to work in NX because you just have to know which buttons to press in which order.