I just did a really quick test on the new FreeCAD release to see how bug an improvement it is over the older versions. I am not currently an advanced CAD user and until now have mostly relied on what I remember of Solidworks knowledge from one course in college. I decided to just do a simple model of the basic shape of a flashlight I have as my test, since most of my issues with the old FreeCAD seemed to show up pretty quickly even in basic designs and mostly seemed to consist of the sketch constraints solver and the 3D part solver getting confused if I did things in an order it didn't like (leading to a lot of trial and error headache).
When I started drawing my first sketch, I noticed the automatic constraints it would set seemed to flow quite intuitively. I was also pleasantly suprised to see that the auto constraints system automatically deleted its own redundant constraints as they came up. Chasing down and deleting numerous redundant constraints was something that made old FreeCAD a pain for me.
When I got to adding multiple adjustments to my part (an additive cylinder, a hole, some fillets, and a chamfer), everything similarly seemed to flow more smoothly than old FreeCAD. Before, the 3D solver seemed to get confused and break if I just did things in an order that made sense to me, and it felt like a pain to go back through and find the order of operations that the solver liked. Now it seems like I can do things as I see fit, and if the order I do things in results in something incorrect I'm the model, I can just reorder the operations in the model panel and it resolves it like it's supposed to.
Overall this gets me way more excited to learn more about CAD and improve my skills. This wasn't an advanced test and maybe I will find some more issues as I learn more, but I think the fact that the basics no longer feel like a chore gives me much more hope for the future of FOSS CAD software.
