but them being on the same package reduces a lot of exporting/importing steps. It's nice to have when you have different people working at enclosure and board. Of course when you use a pre-made enclosures (for which is wish there would be more STEP files available) you can import the model and all the relevant details before you start drawing the PCB
Meh,
I use KiCad and FreeCAD myself, and the "KiCad Stepup Workbench" in FreeCAD is quite powerful. FreeCAD does have a bit of a *&^%$#@! user interface, but apart from that it works quite well with KiCad. I've seen demo's of importing a 3D model of an Hameg enclosure in FreeCAD, making an offset from a contour and then push that directly into KiCad in a 5 minute demo, and half the time of the demo was for "video / tutorial things".
But also, when the mechanical and the electrical guys in a company are separate teams, then they can both do their thing in their own software, and then every now and then synchronize their efforts with a few imports and exports.
I also wonder how big the overlap is to people wanting both mechanical and PCB design, and combining both programs would just add a lot of extra crud for those people. To me it makes much more sense to keep those programs separated, but it is a plus if there are good import / export functions between those programs, so my views are pretty much on par with Pack34 in this regard.
Let's just say that i would appreciate the extra layer of convenience
Having a piece of software in which there is a single project and I do not have to touch anything that YOU are doing but i can see the outputs combined at any time, and YOU do not have to touch anything i'm doing but you can see the outputs combined at every time and we can both share notes.
Not having to do manual export/conversion/import is always nice.
Not that i would ever, EVER use fusion 360. I tried and it looks like a potentially great product, but subscription only and having your data on the cloud.. why would anyone fall for that? i really don't understand. The moment i have to submit my data on the cloud and depend on that, no alternative, i'm out.
Also, it sucks completely that if kicad would ever integrate mechanical design it would have to pass through freeCAD. Because the workflow is questionable at best but the freeCAD community is adamant in being different rather than being as good as, or better. As Kicad was before they managed to appease both the "different" crowd and the others, used to other tools, but for the time being i have little faith in freeCAD growing up.
I was actually discussing this today with a colleague, i updated inkscape to 1.2 the other day and was greeted with the new UI. of course you can find backslash on the internet, to me it was "FINALLY" they moved on from the good old fashioned "this is a linux thing get used to it" look with icons that would look better made on paint instead of gimp, and clunky UI overall. Reallly feels a much more professional product (and i was productive on it before, it was just unnecessary painful compared to almost any other paid product