I had to force myself to forget about rhino after they deprecated the only version I had a license to, and I moved off Windows, because I would have been destroyed if I realized what I had lost.

TLDR: Michael Gibson is the brain child for Rhino3D's UI.

Yup. I know some of this story.

It's been a minute, so I forget some details...

Ages ago, Robert McNeel & Assoc had been working on the geometry kernel for years. They had high value customers who needed very correct results, not available (from other kernels) at the time. By that time, being a VAR, McNeel had experience with most commercial offerings.

Not having their own front end, they had to import/export to other CADD systems. One of their motivations for reverse engineering AutoCAD's DWG format.

McNeel stumbled onto Sculptura. A mesh modeler written by a solo dev. As I remember it, Sculptura's UI was innovative, amazing, and norm breaking. Exactly what McNeel was looking for. They bought it asap. (Gods, I wish I could quickly remember that guy's name.)

McNeel's intent was to synthesize Sculptura's UI and their state of art kernel.

McNeel had the dual luxury of time and no installed base (legacy). Their initiative motivation was a correct kernel. Like correctly joining 3 curving surfaces. (Their canonical example at the time was to accurately model a styrofoam egg carton.) Which took years of R&D.

So they had time to really nail Rhino3D's UI.

Aha. I just found the official history. My memory wasn't too far off.

https://www.rhino3d.software/the-history-of-rhino-3d/

Michael Gibson! Yay! I now recall him grinding away on Rhino. Whenever I visited McNeel, he loved giving demos, talking about ideas, etc. Great guy. (We were both young, surrounded by olds, so had that connection.)