I've gone Abaqus > Ansys > Abaqus/LS-DYNA over my career and hate Ansys with a fiery passion. It's the easiest one to run your first model in, but when you star

I've gone Abaqus > Ansys > Abaqus/LS-DYNA over my career and hate Ansys with a fiery passion. It's the easiest one to run your first model in, but when you start applying it to real problems its a fully adversarial relationship. The fact you have to make a complete copy of the geometry/mesh to a new Workbench "block" to run a slightly different load case (and you can't read in an orphaned results files) is just horrible. Abaqus is more difficult to get up to speed in, but its really nice from an advanced usability standpoint. They struggle due to cost though, it is hugely expensive and we've had to fight hard to keep it time and time again. LS-Dyna is similar to Abaqus (though I'm not fully up in it yet), but we're all just waiting to see how Ansys ruins it, especially now that they got bought out by Synopsys.