This, or similar discussions, arise every so often. New user thinks there is all kinds of improvements that could help if this or that was available. FreeCAD is what it is. It has gotten better as time has progressed. You have spent a LOT of effort to, essentially, say what has been said hundreds of times before.Hologram wrote: ↑Sun Feb 05, 2023 5:04 pm This diametrically opposed:Won't get the discussion anywhere."Yes, I need it"
vs "No I am fine with addons or don't use it at all"
My 2cts is that generic workflow features, such as selection filters, would generally benefit everyone's workflow. You can choose not to use them, sure.
But that's different from saying: "I need feature X so I can model RC planes" or "I need high-end NURBS surfacing to model cars". To me the distinction in what to include by default or to exclude boils down to whether a feature would generally be useful or benefit many workflows as opposed to just a small subset of workflows for a niche industry/ branch.
In Blender, there are many addons that you need to use for some serious modelling (e.g. for select through, loop cuts not being in the center, grouping, handling booleans, moving the 3d cursor and origin, etc.). If any of these addonmakers stops development and compatibility with master ceases to be a thing, then it leads to a large gap in functionality for the software. And that's not advantageous to users.
I get that not developing certain things in master helps to do other things, it's a trade-of and there's only so much time devs can spend on it. But in the long run, it benefits the user to have a reliable, maintained workflow. To me, many addons should be seen as proof of concept or stop-gap band-aid for the time being. Relying on addons in long or very long run will come back at you at some point, unfortunately. It's better to have feature development spread across a group, than to rely on a single, albeit generous, volunteer.
FreeCAD gets better at whatever pace it gets better at. (In fact that pace has increased over the past couple years.)
As to your volunteers, at this point, Addon maker or dev, they are volunteers (and devs are far fewer than addon makers...). There is no group to spread across.
IMO, there is nothing wrong with relying on addons long term. And, in fact, many workbenches have started as addons, even experiments, and ultimately ended up in the core.
The problem you describe with orphaned addons is real, no doubt, I could name some with both Blender and FreeCAD. That doesn't make the concept bad, it's inherent user extensible software.