CAD software reviews: https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/cad
quick review of Rhino, Solidworks, and OnShape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTZpGM2P9u4
industrial design process (part 1 of 4): http://blog.digitaltutors.com/breaking-industrial-design-process-defining-product-setting-designers-day/
Using Blender can be frustrating. There are countless examples of amazing models made on the web, but the software requires learning and knowledge. It is difficult to operate and is suitable mainly for those who intend to specialize in the field of animation. If you wish to design dragons and monsters Blender may be exactly the software for you. source: https://3dprint.com/191978/what-about-3d-cad/
Blender is not a CAD software. It is a very weak NURBS/Parametric_surface modeler. In Blender you would be making everything from polygons. You are also looking for procedural workflow which Blender generally does not offer. Blender is a 3d software with most of it’s actions being destructive. There are no work-planes or sketches. There is no easy export into technical drawing. It is time consuming to constraint geometrical elements (parallel, tangent, etc. relationships) with the constraint system Blender has. Blender can be used for engineering, but it’s not designed for it. As such engineering workflow with Blender is slow and full of workarounds. There is Sverchok addon that can create geometry procedurally - it is simmilar to Rhino’s grasshopper. There are addons to make precise measurements and to help with other engineering tasks, but they cannot change what Blender is. Blender modifiers are procedural (mirror, revolve, array, boolean,…). There are just much better alternatives for free CAD software, then to use Blender for CAD: FreeCAD, NaroCAD, SolveSpace, and I am sure many others. source: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/53293/is-blender-actually-useable-for-engineering
Alternative POV:
…using a Nurbs/parametric Surface modeler is a very weak and extremely time consuming way to create and explore design iterations.
You can make 10 very detailed concepts in Blender/Modo/Maya/Max, then make 2-3 rounds of variations on each of those 10 models, and then rebuild in a Nurbs/Parametric modeler ONCE what you/your team/your client have chosen as the preferred solution. That hybrid approach would take you about 1/10th of the time than doing that same level of concept exploration and refinement in Nurbs. …unless you are making simple boxes/extrudes/booleans.
I don’t think there are programs out there that really don’t require any learning nor knowledge to be used in engineering, industrial design or similar CAD-y areas.
To each their own. I still think it is one of the best GUIs in existance.
You probably meant visualisation and animation, and through its open and superbly integrated API in a wide range of science subjects, and anything beyond the original usages envisioned.