@NCFJ asked recently about CAD recommendations and my response was "I've used every one (the commercial engineering ones anyway) and they all suck".
When the greater engineering community started to embrace CADD, about 35 years ago, it was met with great resistance, simply because it just wasn't faster than drawing on the board. To be clear about this, I started drawing, and paying my way doing it, in 1978. I started with CADD, using both Autocad V10 and HewlettPackard ME10 at the same time, in 1989. I taught the drafting course (lecture and lab) during my (2nd) engineering degree, at UNCC. I've been employed as a consulting designer/engineer in one capacity or other for going on 40 years.
I can still draw anything faster by hand than I can using any drawing/design software. The first time. Where the software is faster than anyone's hand is when you have to make changes, or copy something. No one can match the computer's speed then. But, you have to decide how much your time is worth. When I was drawing professionally, both as a design draftsman and engineer, the drawing was secondary to the job; getting the information out in a hurry was the goal. That's not something anyone not working in an engineering office needs to be concerned about. Even someone running a business who occasionally needs a drawing. IMHO.
I have no experience with the hobby versions, just because always had the heavy duty ones at hand.
Along with the far too complicated cascading menus (ala ProE) and forever expanding recurring dues (ala AutoDesk) for the privilege of using someone's software is the almost complete lack of compatibility across platforms (less of a concern for home users, but still a problem in my mind).
My suggestion was to grab a copy of Vellum (Google: Burt Rutan) and go to work. Since it's no longer current (the current version is cheekily called
Graphite), it's cheap and it's the easiest and most natural program I've ever seen. However, Vellum's hard to find (I looked, since I snagged my copy about 20 years ago) and couldn't find one floating around. I did find this, though:
Comes highly recommended by our friends across the pond, where there's a large model making community, for which there are no drawings, so if you're building something, you have to design it yourself. As a bonus, they have a full license option. That alone makes it interesting for me.
IMO, there's nothing in the DesignPro that's worth $500 over the Atom3D. And no one who's not being paid to draw "needs" to spend $1000+ on drafting software...and if you are being paid to draw, you need software that's likely to cost way more than $1000.
FWIW