I 100% agree with this. However, FreeCAD is also NOT awesome because it lacks the 'timeline' approach that Fusion 360 uses and so you end up with a million rand

I 100% agree with this. However, FreeCAD is also NOT awesome because it lacks the 'timeline' approach that Fusion 360 uses and so you end up with a million random intermediate objects cluttering up your project. FreeCAD has all the parts to be awesome, it just needs to also work on the user interface, and especially the novice experience. This is a universal feature of open source, where unless an individual contributor has an individual bee in their bonnet about beginner UI, any given user interface is just slightly less bad than is unusable and would force someone to fix it. Any 'rough edges for beginners' are ignored because by the time anyone cares enough to fix the rough edge, they're already an expert and have found the workaround.