It's very quirky compared to Fusion360. If they made it at least a little bit smoother to use, at least for my tastes in CAD Software; I would be all in.

Same for me. I got a 3D printer and was more interested in downloading files than creating my own. But when I got into FreeCAD it opened a world of customisation.

It took me a long time to learn and I'm still learning, like ensuring I'm constraining in a way which allows resizing later on in the design.

Yeah learning freecad was a huge pain. Hiwever it does support most things so at least the featureset is good.

Have you tried it recently? I had good success with their tutorials. Though I sure wasn't using advanced features. And plugins were hit or miss.

I couldn't get into fusion at all but had a bunch of (dated) solidworks experience, it worked well for me following a similar workflow I'd follow. Found it worked best to not use references to existing geometry and doing things like fillets last, I like to hand sketch first anyhow so that translates well in my experience.

Part design and sketch workbench are the way to go imo, it's gotten a lot friendlier since 1.0, I recall a lot of people liked ondsel in terms of ux, think a lot of the stuff they were doing actually ended up in 1.0, the topo naming problem is less of an issue, I'll still work around it (hence avoiding geometry references) though.

I think the latest iteration ironed out a lot of UI issues. Not all, but a lot. If you care at all about owning your own files and designs then you basically have to use freecad.

my usability scale from most user friendly (top) to least (bottom)

1. TinkerCad
2. Google sketchup
3. ..
4. ..
5. ..
6. ..
7. ..
8. Autodesk Inventor
9. Blender (CAD plugin)
10. ..
11. ..
12. FreeCAD

TinkerCad is great to teach CAD, but it suffers on important CAD features for production. It also does not make round cylinders, they are polygons. But, sometimes when modifying another model, I can use TinkerCAD where Fusion360 chokes on too many vertices.

FreeCAD is a parametric modeler, so it's closer to Inventor, Fusion360 or OnShape than TinkerCAD. FreeCAD is GPL FOSS software, so it was made by programmers for programmers to program on, not for designers to design designs in. For the most part, features aren't implemented in ways that are useful for the user, they're implemented in ways that were easy or straightforward for the developers.

No hyperbole, a functioning understanding of Python is almost a prerequisite for getting anything actually done in FreeCAD, because you'll encounter things like variable scope.

In some ways, I like how FreeCAD handles things better than some other software. FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built in, you can put your dimensions there in one place and then reference them in drawings (again, think Python variable scope. Dimensions.overall_length) and then if you need to make revisions you don't have to hunt through sketches and shit you just change the parameter. And then watch as the model explodes because they still haven't solved the topological naming problem.