Hey Carl and Lynn,
I don’t know, I don’t use Autodesk software (not even Eagle, but gEDA, then Lepton EDA instead). What I referred to is the many positive reports of people that use Fusion360, so I said “with Autodesk’s Fusion360 you possibly may have a more capable software in comparison to the free and open alternative FreeCAD”, where I referred to the CAM part (called “Path Workbench” in FreeCAD) and I also think the toolpath capabilities of Vectric VCarve Pro could be worth paying for. But I use FreeCAD and Blender. I also use many other free and open software. I think FreeCAD is very versatile but I don’t compare since I don’t have the time to learn all softwares only to compare them, especially not when I don’t like their subscription model, and especially not when they only run on Windows that I don’t use.
Did you have access to AutoCAD and compared it with FreeCAD? You already said what you think of FreeCAD, and I agree, and as long as it helps me very well I see no reason to switch to something else, especially not to proprietary software. FreeCAD has excellent tutorials in many languages and is very versatile, so I would recommend it to anyone.
VCarve Pro has a trial version but it doesn’t allow to export g-code, so the trial version is just to get familiar with the user interface and the capabilities.
If someone doesn’t want to spend money but create an object and run it as g-code and mill it on the CNC, one should start with FreeCAD and see if something is missing.
But I also encounter opinions like this. In a world that increasingly unlearns to let the different opinion of the other to exist benevolently, I think I like to link to it.