I have a lot of experience with openscad. I design a lot of small, simple-to-moderate parts. I want to use something like fusion instead, but the GUI learning curve is a huge blocker for me.
I'm not a CAD professional, I can't seem to find the time to watch hours of video to get the basics down. With code based CAD, the way to start is usually obvious. When I run into a blocker, I search online, find examples, and try them out. Then, crucially, I copy and paste code snippets into my design, and modify them, to solve my problem.
In a GUI cad tool, I find that I spend most of my time hunting for buttons in the UI, often finding UI layout discrepancies between my version and whatever video I found.
In code, I do have to repeatedly solve little trig or geometry problems, and I'm always aware that a constraint based GUI tool would eliminate that completely. But I always know that I can just spend five minutes with pencil and paper and get it done, whereas switching to fusion means adding an hour or more of work to multiple designs.
I really want to design more effectively, with better fillet flexibility. But for my simple tasks, the barrier to becoming productive in a GUI is just too high.
I believe the "command palette" in e.g. VS code solves this well, perhaps a GUI cad with that would be workable for me.
Maybe what would really help me, is a larger more complex project which I can develop over a longer time in fusion while I learn to use it. Too bad I don't have anything that naturally fits that bill.
To me it sounds like it would be worth it for you to learn the basics of Fusion or FreeCAD. You would probably quickly recover the hours spent on learning with increased productivity.
I recommend going through some basic tutorial (written or in video form) to build a simple part. The tutorial should teach view navigation, drawing and constraining a sketch, extruding or rotating it to create a 3D body, modifiying that with chamfers / fillets, creating sketches on top of that to add or cut away parts, add holes, create patterns from features. I don't think you need to learn surface modeling at this point. After that you should be good to go on your own projects. You will still need to look up how to do something (as you do now), but that will improve quickly.
I'm hitting the same problem, getting stuck on simple things in FreeCAD mostly because I'm a novice and don't have hours and hours to watch videos and learn.
I'm generally very much for open-source software, but after my brief experience with FreeCAD and Fusion, I think if I'm going to sink 10+ hours into learning one of them, it will be Fusion. I bookmarked this recently and plan to try it out but have not yet started: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLrZ2zKOtC...
I adopted bosl2 recently, it's wonderful! Anchoring is a huge improvement, which does eliminate a lot of that work. But it's a very large library and I am slowly expanding my knowledge of it.
I'm not a CAD professional, I can't seem to find the time to watch hours of video to get the basics down. With code based CAD, the way to start is usually obvious. When I run into a blocker, I search online, find examples, and try them out. Then, crucially, I copy and paste code snippets into my design, and modify them, to solve my problem.
In a GUI cad tool, I find that I spend most of my time hunting for buttons in the UI, often finding UI layout discrepancies between my version and whatever video I found.
In code, I do have to repeatedly solve little trig or geometry problems, and I'm always aware that a constraint based GUI tool would eliminate that completely. But I always know that I can just spend five minutes with pencil and paper and get it done, whereas switching to fusion means adding an hour or more of work to multiple designs.
I really want to design more effectively, with better fillet flexibility. But for my simple tasks, the barrier to becoming productive in a GUI is just too high.
I believe the "command palette" in e.g. VS code solves this well, perhaps a GUI cad with that would be workable for me.
Maybe what would really help me, is a larger more complex project which I can develop over a longer time in fusion while I learn to use it. Too bad I don't have anything that naturally fits that bill.