I found an interesting article about the evolution of CAD. You might want to read it here: http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aaazer.htm

Meanwhile this caught my eye.

Even Mike Riddle, founder of Evolution Computing and a programmer instrumental in the earliest release of AutoCAD, doesn™t see much viability in low-cost CAD. When businesses start spending money on things like CAD after a recession, they start with low-cost CAD for the non-critical seats, but weaknesses in implementation and interoperability eventually drive businesses back to full-boat™ systemsnot for capability but for reliability.

Zumer,

I can certainly understand his motivation for saying that.

On the other hand I can relate to it, because I have tried TurboCAD off and on for many years, and can never work in it for more than a couple hours because my frustration level gets too high, because the program is so buggy.

Tim has done a much better job than TurboCAD getting rid of a bunch of bugs... but yes, I know, some still remain!

Mike...

P.S. Do you have a link to that Fusion article?

@zumer "...Everything gets a toolbar button?" I will be nice and say that it seems complicated for lack of a better/nicer word. By the way, I think your comment about the UI advantage of Shark being in its subtlety is a good point in that it seems to containerize functionality, making it relative to the tool, not just another pretty leaf to stare at on a tree in a forest, and so on.

I only had a few "drawing board" drawing classes in a community/junior college. I had the fine experience of smelling the cat pee, I mean traditional blue prints process, but only in a class room. As soon as I was accepted into a 4 year state Uni, 2D seemed to vanish. I went from acad 12 to Alias studio in 1 year (wireframe to shaded complex surfacing). Advanced surfacing, nearly realistic 3D rendering on under powered unix workstations ( typical edu funding). Then, back down to earth, my first real career using Rhino 1 thru 3 and Pro-E wildfire 3. Rhino has had a lot of unique tools and options that made it the in-between solution provider when Pro_E couldn't do something easily or at all, or the fact that the firm I worked for didn't want to by Alias studio. Now I use SharkFX for some things and SW for stuff that some mechanical designers and engineers require for interoperability, I play around with the Rhino for Mac OS X once in a while. RHino is quick, like Shark, but its not a feature based solids and surface modeler so its a lot of manual work. Funny thing is that SW can be a pain to set up and make changes with too, but the way it can do a few things (history tree) can make some changes blazing fast.
I think generating a 3D form takes pre-vizualization skills and building it requires some strategy, as well as anticipation to allow for flexibility in a design. 3D forms are complicated, and there is a lot of functionality integrated into these modern, middle tier CAD systems that can boggle the mind.
I am not so sure that 3D CAD will ever become intuitive and I am not sure that it ever needs to be. There is a place for cli in the graphics interface, just not always out in front.
I think my ideal cad system would be "fuzzy", in that I could rough out an idea quickly and add information to areas, then refine the form as needed until it is optimal. It seems like a few of the CAD systems I have used require that a design be nearly optimal from the start, rather than take into consideration the messy process of actually creating a final product.