Been through the same journey -- and have been super annoyed each year when I paid the several hundred dollar license for a tool I didn't use much, but really needed when I did use it.

My exit has been FreeCAD with an MCP-bridge, letting me talk to an agent that implements my requests directly in the FreeCAD file I have open. Works super well with FreeCAD which has all the features I need, but where they can be hard to discover.