I should have made it more clear: this may be my inexperience with the software showing. I guess in SW it flows a bit more smoothly, probably due to making some

I should have made it more clear: this may be my inexperience with the software showing. I guess in SW it flows a bit more smoothly, probably due to making some (apparently relatively safe) assumptions. For exmaple, when I click on the surface of an extruded cube to sketch on it, SW will just assume I'm extruding normally to that surface. I haven't (yet) been able to reproduce that. It occurs to me that I might be really wanting some sort of hybrid Part and Part Design workflow, and that might be my issue. For example, in PD I go sketch > select plane > sketch a shape > pad it to 3D. Then I want to extrude a 2nd section out of one of those faces, so I'd in SW click sketch, and click the face. However, I seem to only be able to click planes. I'm sure there's a way to achieve it, however in SW it is trivial - if I click a surface with any of the sketching tools chosen, it (correctly) guesses that I want to sketch on that surface, using that surface as the X-Y plane (and thus extrude using a normal from that surface) and will automagically fill all that in. I guess that's the main thing I'm getting at, which is why I said it wasn't a criticism of FreeCAD per se.