Most CAD Tools Were Built for Mechanical Engineers
Metal fabricators have been making them work for decades. The result is the same whether you’re using AutoCAD, Inventor, or a patchwork of different tools: hours of manual setup on every project, miter calculations done by hand, no automation for the tasks that repeat constantly, and drawings that don’t map cleanly to what happens on the shop floor.
Smaller shops often work from sketches or 2D drawings, which limits their ability to visualize designs, quote accurately, and compete for jobs that increasingly require 3D model exchange with architects and general contractors.
The tools exist to solve this. Most fabricators just don’t know it yet.