>Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.

If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.

It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.

>They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.

Exactly. These FreeCAD "strategies" you mention align themselves perfectly with the objectives of the legacy CAD industry: To delay; break; and obfuscate opensource CAD.

In other words: The FreeCAD team may not be infiltrated by the legacy-CAD industry, but its behavior is entirely consistent with such a state.

One solution is to fork the behemoth; but if FreeCAD is a hedge-maze-by-design, the only way to win is not to play the game: Build alternatives elsewhere, from scratch.

FreeCAD feels like a time-drainer honeypot. Though whether by accident, or malice, is unknown.