[chx]

Isn't that like people wishing for a more lightweight Excel not realizing the "80% of people only 20% of the features" is true but it's not the same 20%? Could you even come up with a financially viable lightweight enough Autocad competitor?

[Avshalom]

I don't know if it's any cleaner internally but Dassault produces the free (2d focused) DraftSight which is very much on the level of like AutoCAD circa 2000, don't know what the paid version is like or how well it integrates with Solidworks.

[fsloth]

"financially viable lightweight enough"

That's the catch, I think. The market is not so large for 3D modeling tools.

The second hurdle is the ridiculous amount of inertia DWG has in the AEC industry. Any solution that would topple Autocad would need to likely provide DWG and/or Revit interoperability to even have a shot at the market.

There are no good options for Revit at the moment so, that's a deep vendor lock in. For DWG there is at least Teigha library from ODA which is based on reverse engineering the DWG format and offers reading and writing of it.

[rurban]

And there is the revived GPLv3 LibreDWG, which can read most DWG versions. And write support is pretty close. https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libredwg/

[Jamerson]

It would be a long shot. But until something changes, Autodesk is just going to keep layering tools, buttons, and menus on top of each other. It's such a rubber band ball now, they would have to start over to make something efficient. But there's no real competition, because even though it's incredibly cludgy, it will work if you learn it's labyrinth.

[pfranz]

I've been perfectly happy using Google Sheets for 10+ years even though I'm sure it's no substitute for someone in finance. (I don't think CAD software has the same wide appeal, though)