I absolutely see where you're coming from. Autodesk used to offer F360 for free FOR HOBBYISTS. Well, I guess the bean counters stepped in. It's still free, just more limited. I understand their reasoning.
SolidWorks has a program you can sign up for if you're a "start-up". They give you SolidWorks for free for a year or whatever if you qualify. After you get up and going, they're counting on you sticking with them and having the funds by that point to be able to pay for it
AutoDesk Sketchbook IS still free (last I checked). Might wanna try it out if you have a touch screen or a tablet.
I had a tiny machine screw on my laptop and shut it on it. Tiny little crack on the screen... WELL, I had to disable the touch screen 'cause of it. Oops!
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The problem with FREE (beer, not speech) vs FOSS is that it is only free until they decide it isn't. So it is kind of like free first hit of heroin. Once you are hooked, then they can charge you whatever they like. Or they can completely kill the product and leave you in a lurch.
Even if a FOSS product doesn't do everything the exact way I want, having more users brings more programmers to work on it. And as long as it is FOSS, it may get the interest of commercial companies to work on it like during Google's Summer of Code and things like that. Worst case scenario, if I am the last person in the world depending on it... I can still go in and fix any problems with it.
There's a strategy called "dynamiting the pond" where someone comes into town and offers their product way below everyone else's price. Then when all the competitors go out of business and they have the monopoly on that product, they raise the price and get filthy rich. That's how some people see "FREE" (beer, not speech) software. And because of that, I avoid those.
Blender is an absolutely fabulous product. There is a plugin for it now that does CAD Sketching with constraints. It isn't perfect, and I will keep an eye on it. But, both blender and FreeCAD will take in SVG. As well, FreeCAD will output STL which Blender will happily consume. FWIW, I really love Inkscape. It is my goto for drawing, and tracing. With its path editor, I can do amazing stuff. Bringing those paths into FreeCAD I can easily convert them to a sketch, parameterize that sketch, and end up with an infinitely scalable template for damn near anything. I could then model it, export it to STL and import it into Blender, and render it, animate it, or whatever. So far I am not missing any tools in this toolbox that any of the commercial packages are offering. I am neither doing 3D printing, nor CNC, at this point, but FreeCAD will output the right formats for them. And I have used Inkscape to send SVG to Ponoco to have them laser cut things for me quite successfully.
At this point, I don't even see much reason to go back to libreCAD/QCAD for 2D modeling. I can do all that in either FreeCAD Sketcher or Draft or Draw workbenches. And this way it keeps me with one set of tools to work with, rather than having vastly different keysets and mouse behaviors.
On the other note, with FOSS, if I propose a change, either someone will find it interesting and take it on, or I can make the change myself, or someone will show me how I can already achieve my goal just using a different feature that already exists. With commercial tools (even the Free (beer not speech) ones) I would get "Thank you for your suggestion, we will take it into consideration, and if the board of trustees and the shareholders feel it necessary we may consider adding something similar at some point in the future as we see fit." or Apple's wonderful line "That sounds like a tremendous third party opportunity!"
I use as little Non-FOSS software as possible. I can probably list on one hand the non FOSS software I use, and those are because they are mandated and provided by work.
