Adventures in proprietary software, Solidworks edition
Because FreeCAD was such a disaster for me, I started looking at crazy solutions, like exporting STEP from OpenSCAD. I even stooped to looking at proprietary alternatives. First on the runway was SolidWorks. If it's good for Mark Serbu, surely it's good for me, right?
The first thing I found, you cannot tap your card and download. You have to contact a partner representative - never a good sign. The representative quoted me for untold thousands. I'm not going to post the amount, I'm sure they vary it every time, like small shop owners who vary prices according to the race of the shopper.
In addition, they spam like you would not believe. First you have to unsubscribe from the partner, next from community.3ds.com, next from draftsight.3ds.com, and so on. Eventually, you'll get absolutely random spam, you try to unsubscribe, and they just continue and spam. Fortunately, I used a one-time address, and I killed it. Phew.