I mean I disagree about not sympathizing with folks somewhat trapped in a hostile software ecosystem, but surely “stand by your beliefs” is not unheard of.

With about a half an hour of reading documentation it became very clear a couple versions ago what work benches were, which were useful to me, and how to use them. That’s maybe longer than going from inventor to solidworks or visa versa, but hardly that bad. For a beginner it will be taking a long time anyway and there will be essentially no difference, except that you’ll learn a much more robust understanding of how parametric modeling works.

Freecad has improved considerably in the last year, to a point where I’ve gone from saying I will wait to use it, to recommending it. It may actually have been designed for humans now.