It's beyond that though. How many different, incompatible, assembly bench plugins are there these days?

Yeah, the different, incompatible assembly plugins is why I stopped using FreeCAD a few years ago.

That's reportedly been fixed (guess they picked a winner?), but I haven't taken a look since. I probably will, at some point, but I generally have a different focus these days.

They didn't pick a winner. They (Ondsel and others) evaluated all the workbenches, chose the best ideas and built a new workbench around a new (well, new to C++) solver.

There was an Ondsel blog post about this:

https://ondsel.com/blog/default-assembly-workbench-7/

Thanks, that's good info. It sounds like a really optimal outcome. :)

It is. The chap they hired to do port his solver has done really great motion solving work in the past (and, amusingly, had an application called "FreeCAD" before FreeCAD existed).

http://www.ar-cad.com

It's very positive that he's working for Ondsel.

Ondsel helps a lot with that. FreeCAD 1.0 I think also now has a default Assembly bench.

You just reminded me that I had tried Catia once before and that it also completely flummoxed me in how unobvious its approach was.

Now why would anyone choose that program as the one to base theirs off of, it isn't like Pro/E and SolidWorks weren't around in 2002 when they started FreeCAD.