>FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I think FreeCAD might be on a distant hilltop in their rearview these days, check it out again.

I tried it for the first time the other day after having heard how much better it's gotten recently, and it made me really wonder how bad was the UX _before_ all these recent improvements. I don't want to bash on it too hard, because it's clear that a ton of hard work has gone into it, but it was really a struggle for me to get some pretty basic things done. The only feedback for a lot of things I tried to do was some not-very helpful error messages in the console, or just the whole program crashing. After trying hard for quite a few hours, reading lots of docs and watching tutorials, I ended up giving up and going back to Fusion 360.

Yeah but objects in mirror are closer than they appear