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 I'm learning FreeCAD right now. It is work-related, and on work time, so not taking away from writing (except in spent brain cells).

I did check out the new price structure on Fusion360. It is nasty, but do-able; sixty bucks a month (less if you pay three years in advance). And...no way in hell. I had a lifetime subscription at the lock-in price of $25 a month. Until they decided to arbitrarily change it. And the current version no longer allows you to save off-line copies of your files; it is all in the cloud (not that it matters, since it it proprietary format anyhow.)

Their current hobby use license restricts how many files you can have access to, meaning your work is essentially held hostage in the cloud against any future changes in licensing. And many functions have been moved to the paid version only.

Which has tiers. Which means essential functions, plus, you know, the very files you are working on, would be day-to-day at the mercy of a software company that decided to alter the terms of their agreement. "Pray I do not alter them further."

This is software-as-a-service model. Even without the sudden changes in terms, Fusion360 was constantly adding new features (whether or not anyone had asked for them), whilst neither fixing existing bugs nor, even more importantly, getting around to documenting any of them. On their own site, the front-page-linked tutorials would use terms and describe buttons and, indeed, entire organizational-level (as in, do you move a sketch to the model room, or do you open a sketch panel from the main model window?) that hadn't been current for at least three versions.

Plus the inevitable upgrading until only the latest OS would run it -- forcing another round of upgrading everything. Fusion360 forced these upgrades. It would literally refuse to work unless you installed them. I was only barely able to finish the Ray Gun project by taking my computer off-line for a month and leaving it there (even resetting the system clock lest Fusion360 figure it out that way.)

PhotoShop has gone the same way, although there, at least, you aren't forced to upgrade and you can keep your files -- in a format other software can still open! -- on your own computer instead of sending them down the Tokkaido Road to hang out in Edo for half the year. Of course PhotoShop is all about the upselling and has the invisible, impossible-to-circumvent Creative Cloud which according to my system monitor is hogging 5% of my CPU right this moment...in case Adobe has some other new plug-in they want to try and sell to me.

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FreeCAD had a bit of the "it is never the software's fault" philosophy. Fusion360, for all its faults, let you do a lot of stuff that might break the software (it rarely did). FreeCAD, like the late and completely unlamented Carara3d, is absolutely crazy with nagging pop-ups and will refuse to progress until every possible ambiguity is nailed down. Not that it will, you know, tell you where the ambiguity is. Just that you will not be permitted to close the window until what you've done meets some internal standard of perfection.

For all of that, I've made three parts already and I'm printing off a set of one them now.

Yes, I have a printer. Ender 3, possibly the best of the Ender series as it is basic, solid, dependable and there's a ton of after-market support. Basically the Crown Vic of printers. It has been running almost constantly since I assembled it (made one for a friend as well).