[amelius]

I was thinking that since Blender has physics simulation, and it also has nice video renderings, that would be two great reasons to use it for mechanical designs with moving parts, for example.

But I don't have much experience in designing parts. I like SolveSpace, but it becomes slow for medium/large designs. I know FreeCAD has a lot of problems with stability and UI consistency, so I avoided it.

[rounce]

FreeCAD has more rigorous simulation features - FEM/FEA, mechanical assembly, CAM path generation and simulation, and robotics to name a few - out of the box which makes sense as it’s for engineering rather than art, and there are additional addons for CFD and sheet metal available among many others.

The recent 1.0 update brought some major UI/UX improvements, though if you’re coming from other software you’ll find the Ribbon addon to be extremely helpful to feel comfortable. I think it gets a lot of over the top criticism given there are more people working on just the Autodesk CAD kernel than the entirety of FreeCAD and its dependencies. The rate of improvement is gradually accelerating and its already a big jump from where it was a few years ago.