Thank you @felttippen for this post!
It is not long and points out one of the main feature I think rhino should definitively have.
I talked already about this, among other feature requests here but your points, together with all other suggestions, show what is missing. I fully agree with most of them.
Please @stevebaer, @wim and @Japhy work through this to have it implemented into Rhino 8, thanks!
My experience is with Microstation and Spaceclaim.
Microstation: anything can be done but is far from straightforward, reliable and intuitive: you can define for each view front/back clipping plane together with Section plane, define visualization style for every volume/section but it is quite complicated and you need to keep track of links to model, layer local/global display, level symbology…
You can have dynamic / cached contours and hide some of them but at the end any little detail can just break your drawing or make you wait minutes for an update.
In short: it is powerful but so old, slow and painful.
On the other hand Spaceclaim drafting is super easy and intuitive but unfortunately lacks some basic tools (like sheets reordering) to be really effective. Copy/Paste worked great from Rhino 5 to SC but is not working anymore.
Here a video showing SC workflow.
Where I get lost sometime is dimensioning which I think is oversimplified.
→ Please look at 1:20 of this video as well which shows the interesting way SC place 3D geometry on sheet.
Closing this post, I think we don’ t need to go too much far from what is already around on Mechanical software maybe with some more freedom in display from Architectural software but let’s keep it simple!
Last point: drawing output of all displayed contours has to be Vector!
Spaceclaim for instance creates a PDF which couples vector contours with a background of rendered view to keep together display intent with lines crispiness.