3DPrinting

That's what I thought, thanks for playing. Currently Autodesks products sit at something like 6.6m+ users and counting. Additionally, Autodesk has taken over universities and is likely more peoples first introduction to CAD in the first place. Your claim holds no water whatsoever. You are delusional if you think FreeCAD of all things has touched more people than the commercial products. Even Blender, with its incredible capabilities can't be said to have gotten more people into 3D modeling, etc than commercial offerings like Maya, taught in schools everywhere. And I say this with the whole-hearted belief that Blender is better in every way to the commercial offerings.

There also is a reason why I put down their effort and hard work. Hard work doesn't mean success. If someone with no technical knowledge toiled away building a 3D printer that was garbage (Say, the FT5, FT6 for example), their product isn't more righteous because there was more work put into it. You'd still tell people to get a Prusa, or something better. There's nothing wrong with that. Telling people to get into FreeCAD just because it's open source, with no consideration into the fact that FreeCAD breaks more frequently than other cad programs, is more difficult to use, has a terrible workflow, and is generally going to result in frustration moreso than productivity, is absolutely a garbage take on things.

Do you WANT people to like 3D printing? Because I do. Pushing them to some software that is going to drive them away from that ultimately, because of your open source "religion" is counter to that goal.

So much as I will do my best to drive people to open source, I will always account for ease of use, capability, and learning curve before I let my open source evangelism override those key points. If you direct people to software that ultimately makes them hate the task, it drives them away.

Ultimately I think it would be a huge mistake for this community to try driving people to FreeCAD in spite of better alternatives. In the long run it will drive people away from the hobby. I've got more than 12 years of experience in 3D printing, and I run my own 3D printer repair shop which repairs thousands of machines each year, so I kind of know this stuff.