For me it's not the online-only or closed nature of the thing, so much as the fact the canvas isn't high-DPI, which I find unreasonably maddening (I am unreasonably snobbish in this regard).
And the grid-oriented working method isn't ideal for me, though I confess I've not gone back to look at TinkerCAD much since learning OpenSCAD and FreeCAD; it may be that a better-informed visit would show me where I was judging it too hardly.
But it is amazing what people do with it, and while I have my issues with AutoCAD, it's clear that TinkerCAD is a truly liberating tool for an enormous number of people, and my criticisms may be getting into gift-horse-examination territory.
I think your points are fair, it is a bit fiddly, I just enjoy how little friction there is to getting started and making something simple.
I just needed to make a couple adjustments to an STL this week, I haven't done any CAD in months, in principle I have used Fusion before and had a nice experience with it, but since it's been a while I don't remember any of it and would have to look at some reference to get back into it, with tinkercad I could just drop the model in and make the adjustments I need by playing around with the shapes they provide.
It didn't feel very "precision engineering" like but sometimes it just needs to be close enough.
Right. I mean that is the thing, I guess. For people who just want to get some stuff done in a way that makes sense, TinkerCAD is about as low-friction as it gets.
It's also arguably better at hacking on STLs than a bunch of higher-end CAD packages; it feels like that's been a focus of their efforts.
Personally what I'd really like to see alongside it is a sort of Scratch-blocks-based OpenSCAD/Build123D type thing -- this may already exist?
And the grid-oriented working method isn't ideal for me, though I confess I've not gone back to look at TinkerCAD much since learning OpenSCAD and FreeCAD; it may be that a better-informed visit would show me where I was judging it too hardly.
But it is amazing what people do with it, and while I have my issues with AutoCAD, it's clear that TinkerCAD is a truly liberating tool for an enormous number of people, and my criticisms may be getting into gift-horse-examination territory.