Am I imagining, or did I notice your reply had a little extra mustard on it? 
Robert
That or salt.
I donāt much like Autodesk, nor how they have behaved in my experience.
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I agree, but I use AutoCAD and Fusion360 as easily as I use a piece of pencil and a piece of paper. Iāve been using Autodesk software since about 1985, and as long as you give them a bag of money every year, they treat you fine.
Itās all in what you are used to.
I love CATIA but donāt particularly like the company. My experience in that has polluted my brain to a degree that I canāt get Sketchup.
Admittedly I have not tried Fusion yet but I am not enthralled with their low threshold for the hobby level. Hard to argue that though that they should give it away free. Lots of effort and resources go into the development of the software. These days everyone thinks software should be free. Maybe they could release a version that would pop up a commercial every 5 minutes like most IOS apps my kids use.
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In my experience, every so often, someone who has paid up, gets treated poorly, and of course thereās the bigger issue how how they treated the industry and community as a whole by making Fusion 360 freely available when they wanted it to be widely used and to have videos and so forth created so as to create a bandwagon effect and how that took all the oxygen out of the room for pretty much everyone else.
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On the other side of the coin, Autodesk was able to easily collect information on the deadbeat companies that were using Fusion360 without subscribing.
This is my problem with many hobbyists. Free Free Free. You get what you pay for and thatās that. There is a wonderful world of software out there that we have free choice to love or hate, stay or leave. But the creators of that software deserve to be amply rewardedā¦ including C3d. I have walked away from most Adobe software using that freedom, although I know that it is still the best at what it is intended to be.
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I completely agree. Having said that, I am not a big fan of the subscription model. In most cases companies make the switch to that model and donāt adequately reduce the price to reflect that it is a subscription.
I applauded Carbide 3D for offering both options and having reasonable prices applied to each. BTW, I bought a 1 year subscription to CC Pro even though I am not generally in favor of the model. It was a lower cost way in this case to evaluate the capability.
Right. I am a Vectric Aspire guy myself. I never used CC at all, probably never will. But I like Carbide Motion for the bitsetter and that together with lightburn I can do pretty much anything short of 4th axis (which I donāt have anyhow)
I happily pay for lightburn, because the software is awesome, polished, constantly developed and updated, supports a huge range of machines, and it honestly feels like the developers are passionate about their software helping others work better. On the flip side, Iāve tried most of the big names in cnc software, and itās eternally frustrating trying to get a workflow going. CC is basic, Vectric is stuck in 32 bit land, carveco has weird workflows, alibreās workflow was frustrating, thereās a ton of āfreeā linux based cnc software that has expired modules so they donāt installā¦ Itās made trying to enjoy the machine itself a lot of work. I think part of the problem is by marketing to the hobbyist, the expectation of a complete software package included has taken development dollars away from a solid software team. It would be nice if a software package for CNC was available with the same quality as lightburn is for lasers.
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Have you checked recently? I think only photo v carve is 32 bit.
With version 12 Vectric will bring their suite up to modern computing standards and will support new Windows Design Guidelines, GPUs, and much more. Was hoping itād be this Fall and be introduced at the just-passed Worldwide User Group meeting but we were instead we got 11.55. Hopefully next year ā¦
Are these the same design guidelines which have interface elements gratuitously rounded off so that computer manufacturers have begun painting the underside of monitor glass so as to obscure pixels at the corners to force said rounding into the real world since Microsoft canāt program it in at the corners of displays?
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I have mentioned this before, and will again
Pixelcnc PixelCNC ā Deftware
So far I have not found any shortcomings or tomfoolery in it. Pixel is slightly complex but has tutorial windows that will open when you hover the mouse pointer over most features. It is a good creating program and works very well for importing and converting files. Pixel does not have a āBit Toolboxā installed. You use a tool library to create any bit you want. Pixel does not require a live internet connection to use it.
The purchase is a one time price, no annual re-new. The present cost is around $150.
Pixelcnc has a free trial version, the only restriction that I remember is you can not save the file but you can run it.
The only drawback to it is that it is a fairly new program and has a very small user base to correspond with, however, if you can figure things out on your own you should be good to go with it.
The part where the developer says the program was created by artists for artists comes from a graphic artist background.
For a one time fee of $150 it is not a big gamble.
Thatās good to hear, I havenāt been following whatās coming for the next Vectric. Of all the software Iāve tried, Iām most likely to buy that for CNC. Hopefully the new version will include opengl support so I can see previews in linux. Thereās a great amount of third party help on youtube for vectric, so Iād probably bear down and take a course to learn it properly.
Hopefully theyāll embrace guidelines that offer value. 
Hopefully. I bought Vectric a while back, but found the UI cluttered and confusing and eventually stopped upgrading.
That said, Iāve been very grateful of Carbide Create getting ever closer to feature parity.
I downloaded PixelCNC and have made it through the first couple of tutorials. It seems powerful but the tutorials seem to assume a fairly high level of ability already.
The nag screens on the trial are tedious. I very few minutes or interactions you have to wait a minute.
But like I say, it seems powerful once you understand how to work with it.
It seems the more familiar I got with it, the more impressive it became. I do not have any of the higher cost programs to make a comparison so I wont try. You are very correct on it seems to require a good deal of similar knowledge or use experience, but the ability to hover the mouse pointer over any feature and a window opens with a short explanation of what that feature does is helpful in figuring things out. For the most part the thing that confused me at first is learning to think of your work/image area as a ācanvasā. After that the layers, tool creation, and path choices are easy enough. Puts out a nicely smooth product if you set it too.
Could be worse, there could be a ānotchā in the display they canāt get around and spend 5 years claiming is really a ādifferentiating featureā in their UXā¦