They are really putting in the work to make FreeCAD not suck. I was a SolidWorks pro and still found FreeCAD quite unintuitive to use. Ondsel has fixed a lot of those issues... looking at you dimensioning tool. It also "just works" on Linux which is really nice (a friend tried on windows and not so much lol)
the ui is actually pretty good when you get used to it imo, it's just that it's very busy and intimidating for beginners
I think there should just be a simple builtin tutorial that beginners can access, that guides them through making a cylinder or something to assure them that freecad isn't as intimidating as it looks
That's a good idea, and I think that teaching yourself parametric CAD for the first time in freecad is extra difficult because it is easy to do things that look like they may work but actually break you model (especially dragging stuff around in the hierarchy).