alt Hacker Newsto be a bit tautological, openscad is nice but only for the things openscad is nice for. I prefer freecad for almost everything except highly parametric shapes. Plus you can do openscad inside of freecad.
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i did ton of projects in open scad in the past (8+yrs ago), even having access to freecad and solidworks. I was even sending patches to some 2d features on freecad.
but what made me use scad was reliability. i knew the time i put writting in vim would translate (heh) into a viable stl file i could send to manufacturing. while with both other options half the time was dealing with bugs and crashes and bad exports.
but how did i miss some convenience tools indeed. most could be solved with opensource methods (e.g. bevel, joiners with easing, threads)
The great thing about OpenSCAD is that it makes modeling using cubes, spheres, cylinders, and placing or stretching them mathematically easy.
The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that one's capabilities in it are bounded by one's fluency in using math to place or stretch cubes, spheres, and cylinders.