I work on CAE software that started in the 90's but some of our biggest competitors started in the 70's or even 60's. It's actually a bit depressing how little

I work on CAE software that started in the 90's but some of our biggest competitors started in the 70's or even 60's. It's actually a bit depressing how little has changed in all that time. Things move very slowly, perhaps because the software is so enormously complicated and has thousands of important features that are all vital to somebody. It's hard to abstract that into something smoother for the user without breaking many well established use cases or wasting computer resources (It's CPU and memory hungry, and no amount of Moore's law has made a dent in that). Now there are startups doing cloud based versions, which is great, but it's still basically the same thing except in the cloud. It's still a steep learning curve. It's still trivially easy for users to get things wrong without even knowing they're wrong. You still pretty much need a university course as training on how to use the software safely. But, you're right, it's satisfying knowing that it's like building a house. You can put a lot of effort into designing it solidly with a long future in mind.