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)