I spent about a year designing and building a boat in Rhino, and it worked great. I did use OpenNest to nest unrolled surfaces for cutting parts.
Now I want to design a V2 and some other boats, and I’m wondering if Grasshopper is worth investing time into. I know the hydrostatics and center of gravity tools could be useful, but I think step one would be learning how to use it for simpler design.
One thing I kept running into was redrawing the same types of parts as the design changed. I’d constantly remake lids where the shape changed, but the concept stayed the same. Like a 1-inch lip with a 1/4-inch gap. Can Grasshopper realistically speed up that? Does it work well in a mix where some things are in grasshopper and others are modeled normally in Rhino, or does it only really shine when the whole project is built around it?
Most of what I see online is generative geometry and architecture. I haven’t seen much practical tutorials for real-world fabrication and boat, car, bike, etc…
To deside at what point grasshopper make no sense is not really obvious. I often get obsessed with it and it was useless in the end. I would start by making only small scripts and use it as a command and see how it works.
Parametric design can solve the problems you mention, but the choice of using grasshopper will depend on you. Grasshopper is a wonderful tool for all sorts of things, but the learning curve is something to consider. It takes a great deal of effort on your part to learn all the different components you need and understand how to work with the data trees. Software like Fusion, Solidworks and Inventor simplify some of that by defining the different parameters in each sketch. You can access those variables and define the interaction between them quite easily. The downside is that software does not work as well with a lot of highly complex shapes you can find. I suggest you upload a sample model from Rhino and let some offer some more thoughful advice.