Yeahhh the freemium bait & switch. Thought that might happen. For 30 years Autodesk had given Adobe a run for their money in the most predatory business practices, & right when Apple was getting a lot of criticism for locking people into their “ecosystem”, all the big software houses jumped on the bandwagon. Dassault threw a free 2d alternative out there to Autocad, and Autodesk threw a free 3d modeler out there to get a generation of students creating their work in it instead of Solidworks. Adesk tried a decade earlier to take Solidworks’ market share with Inventor but were too late to the party & Inventor was still priced to the moon like it was 1988. So now, after all those multitudes have their design libraries in fusion that they’ll effectively have to abandon or pay protection money, Adesk starts pulling the rug out. What was the first batch of functionality they took back out, simulation? Now it’s multipart assy’s, and Rapid moves? In 6 months, I expect adaptive tool paths will be on the chopping block.
My planned transition to a legit Fusion user is now one less thing I’ll have to spend any time on. Instead I suppose I’ll stick to using the standalone installs of the very nice professional-level Inventor Studio Pro w/ HSM software that the engineering/programming students of the world keep sharing on to Capt Jack Sparrows Bay. …which is the software Autodesk could have just sold everyone in the first place, sold 10x as much of it by pricing it in the modern market of today instead of the 1980s, and poured that revenue into developing, providing them and us with a lot more value for the $. Instead we got the worst of both worlds, as usual from them, bc they always have to go one greedy business decision too far.
There is room for an open-source Inventor-like solid modeler. Make it run on ARM processors, toss it on tablets, crowdsource the support, & take over the entire world.