We are shutting down Ondsel

Every time I have a personal project and want to make a simple CAD drawing of a building or a simple model, as I would using AutoCAD at work, I go through the same song and dance. I look around at the options online, my jaw hangs open at the cost of any commercial CAD subscription/licence, then I get frustrated by a glaring lack of functionality or useability while trying some free/open source solution, and resort to a 30 day trial or MSPaint/paper.

Some of the comments already mention how blender's existence is predicated upon it filling a niche in certain senses, instead of trying to achieve feature parity with an entrenched giant. That makes sense, and it's unfortunate, as this space could use an open source option with Blender's polish. In my own industry, mining, I am certain some commercial interests would happily make their product an extension/plugin for a polished FreeCAD (or other), were it at that point.

Blender is often used as an example of open source polish, but I think too many people focus on how it exists today and not how it evolved. Blender got its start as a commercial tool that a pool of people raised €100,000 to pay to make it open source. And for years Blender's UI was criticized as being too difficult and too different from tools like Maya. It's a marvelous tool today because a dedicated group of people donated their time to improving it or were sponsored by others willing to contribute monetarily.

FreeCAD isn't as refined as Blender, but it also hasn't had the same level of support. I've found the maker community particularly critical, often in uncostructive ways, around OSS CAD tools like FreeCAD or SolveSpace. It's hard to compete with commercial offerings that have full time designers working on them. To get there we need volunteers to work on the project and/or folks willing to fund development. Ondsel demonstrated how well that could work for FreeCAD. But, the maker community has largely been unwilling to contribute either in terms of cash or time. And many take to publicly bashing the tools, which doesn't exactly entice those volunteering to go out of their way to help.

We could have the Blender equivalent of an OSS CAD package, but people are going to need to step up and contribute. I appreciate that you often have a time sensitive task and going with a commercial tool is more expedient. That's fine, of course, but that also isn't going to help advance any of these OSS tools. Just also be aware that you're at risk of losing your design as well since commercial licensing can change on a whim (e.g., Fusion 360 preventing STEP export for free accounts -- this decision ended up being reversed, but should be concerning).