I wonder if it's because of patent-trolling crap, like Adobe's case.

(Adobe runs patents on individual good-design features, like "having x option available on the right-click menu", forcing competitors to have that same option buried in some other dropdown menu somewhere, or have the same option split in multiple steps, in order to avoid being sued...)

AutoCAD's company has done other sleazy copyright-related shit, so I wonder if something similar is going on, just like Photoshop alternatives being shit.

It's a damn shame, too, because the commercial software in the sector is abusively overpriced, and there's just nothing to be done about it (unless somebody can get antitrust regulators to pay attention, which hasn't happened yet, and I'm not holding my breath for it).

It's not like the FOSS options out there aren't fundamentally capable of doing the job, either -- it's just that they almost universally seem to have been designed by people who think of GUIs as a concession to the normies, and don't understand typical or expected design workflows. I'd love to be able to use FreeCAD instead of Fusion for hobby projects, but just creating a sketch in the former is like fighting through molasses compared to the process in Fusion. A bit of focus on UI instead of under the hood features would go along way towards making these programs viable competitors -- look at how Blender's perception changed amongst professionals after it ditched its idiosyncratic pre-2.7 UI, for instance.

Don't even get me started on BIM software... Ridiculous subscription pricing, barely a bug fix to be found, and feature requests ignored for a decade or more! The last release of Revit's headline new feature was (drumroll, please...) A dark UI mode. Good to see Autodesk put my employer's seven-figure subscription payments to good use. 😑