The great thing about OpenSCAD is that it makes modeling using cubes, spheres, cylinders, and placing or stretching them mathematically easy.

The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that one's capabilities in it are bounded by one's fluency in using math to place or stretch cubes, spheres, and cylinders.

I suck at math but I can do pretty neat stuff with OpenSCAD that would take me 10x longer with 'the usual suspects' in CADland. It took me a while to get the hang of it though, I think the bigger issue with using OpenSCAD is a shift of perspective. From the outside it looks like solid modeling with primitives, but once you 'get it' the method changes completely, it is probably easier to explain with an example:

If you want to make a complex gear that has to mate with another gear you can do this in two ways: you can start with two discs intersecting at the right angle and then to chop out the teeth so the resulting object will be a gear and then you could subtract via a similar operation from the other disc to end up with two mating gears.

The - in my view much more effecient - alternative is to start off with just the supports as the discs and then to parametrically add the gear teeth onto the supports taking into account all of the clearances and the contact faces. This will get you much better gears because you are parametrically describing the surfaces that really matter and it will allow you to do nice things such as small fillets on everything to make the object far closer to what eventually will roll out of your manufacturing process (machining, 3D printing). It is a bit more work to define all of the parameters but the end result is much better and far less likely to have imperfections because you are generating what you want, not removing what you don't want. OpenSCAD can be used for sculpting, but that's not the best way of using it.

On the bright side it refreshed my knowledge of trigonometry...