When I first got into 3D printing, I used OpenSCAD for my designs. The fact that objects are described with code made me feel right at home. It made it incredibly easy to make parametric designs.
But later, I did start to feel the limitations. Not having automatic fillet/chamfer was huge. And sometimes, I wanted the ability to measure the distance between two points selected visually to make sure all my math involving offsets was correct.
And as the article mentions, certain shapes end up with a lot of artifacts unless you "render" them, which can take a while. I designed a refillable catnip toy [0] and all the holes in it made the CSG subtraction take ~15 minutes, IIRC. Without rendering though, the opening on the bottom was solid, along with other glitches.
The trick with holes is to make your negative geometry penetrate past the surface. Meeting exactly on the surface will be too glitchey otherwise with the fast floating-point approximation.
Fillets and chamfers though, yeah. The lack of those drives me away. As Quinn (Blondihacks) says: "Chamfers are what separate us from the animals.", and as This Old Tony says: "When it comes to chamfers, you don't want to cut corners." (And if you don't know who I am quoting, you clearly don't waste enough time watching machinists on Youtube.)
Chamfers can be done by extruding the chamfer shape along a wireframe of the geometry to be chamfered, then subtracting the extrusion from the original geometry. I'm not sure how I'd do fillets in OpenSCAD, though.
You can use a Minkowski sum to give yourself a fillet. I did it once. It worked but was 2x as hard as learning enough Fusion360 to do that whole part and then each design after that is 20% as hard.
I eventually got pretty good at OpenSCAD, but I’d say I now reach for OpenSCAD about 3x/year and everything else is in Fusion.
I either live without, or get creative with use of hull, cylinder (including cones), making toroids by radial extruding circles (using the toroid as a cut shape just to get a fillet around a post), or I just open the scad file in freecad, and then apply the fillets in freecad.
It's definitely a weakness in the sales pitch having to work that hard for something you want that often.
All of my scad designs include an o=0.01; or 0.001, and all it's for is for prepending or appending to other values and expressions all over the place so that cuts and joins always overlap at least a little.
As a mechanical designer who has quite a bit of machining experience, I'm the person sounding like a broken record about chamfers when doing design reviews. Blondihacks quote will be going straight into my repertoire of quotes.
Before I ran into insurmountable (for me) performance issues with OpenSCAD, I made heavy use of BOSL2[0]. I’d go as far as call it OpenSCAD’s missing standard library. It’s truly sublime.
Fun fact: BOSL2 was written by the same person who made the world’s most 3D printable 3D printer. [1]
I felt the same way and ended up graduating to SolveSpace for shapes I felt were too complex for OpenSCAD. After a few hours learning the new process (create planes and then extrude them) and the shortcut keys, I now exclusively use SolveSpace and my designs have never looked better.
This describes my experience pretty closely. At first OpenSCAD seems like a dream come true: just assemble a few basic shapes with only a few lines of code and you're done!
But things get complicated pretty fast, and as you say, no fillet or chamfer is a terrible limitation. It calls for complex and unpleasant/ugly alternatives (usually, extruding 2D shapes that already have the right angles).
The other big problem with OpenSCAD is that very few true CAD programs are able to import it, and those who do, don't do it well.
So it is fun to play with, but unfortunately it's not really usable for serious work.
But later, I did start to feel the limitations. Not having automatic fillet/chamfer was huge. And sometimes, I wanted the ability to measure the distance between two points selected visually to make sure all my math involving offsets was correct.
And as the article mentions, certain shapes end up with a lot of artifacts unless you "render" them, which can take a while. I designed a refillable catnip toy [0] and all the holes in it made the CSG subtraction take ~15 minutes, IIRC. Without rendering though, the opening on the bottom was solid, along with other glitches.
[0] https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4687159