My impression of FreeCAD as a project is that for much if its life it has suffered from a certain amount of developer churn and lack of focus. It's like somebody builds a workbench and gets it working just good enough using a workflow that makes sense to them, but then nobody ever really bothers to flesh out the rest of it, so if you try to do things in a different way that may be perfectly sensible to you the result is a broken mess. Eventually somebody decides they can do better, and maybe they do, but the replacement still has a lot of rough spots that never get finished and the cycle starts again.

It seems like the development team has gotten much more organized in the last couple years, so I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that good open source parametric CAD is something the world really needs.