Comment by disqard
Thank you for sharing your experience!
Would you mind sharing a bit more about your workflow? Do you export to obj/stl? What slicer do you use?
Five years is a decent amount of Time, and I'm sure you have much hard-won knowledge (and gotchas) to share.
(Personally, I'm stuck on the mental block of "I know I should just get and learn Fusion360" but I cannot bring myself to knowingly tie myself to a subscription-based piece of rentware.)
Thanks in advance!
Edit to add: my motivation is 100% to use this for 3d printing.
I was in the same boat as you and sounds like others in this thread, >1000 hours in Blender over the past few years, but learned Fusion360 to be able to get parts lasercut and machined so had to go to proper parametric CAD format. The simple answer is use both - some things like making a simple bracket or fixture are just much easier in CAD. For organic shapes with lots of complexity, sub D modeling is far faster and easier IMO in Blender than the ways to achieve that in CAD (like T splines in Fusion).
The space between those 2 things is where you have to decide what you are really trying to accomplish. The program you use will have an impact on what your result looks like, you see this in the evolution of product design alongside the evolution of design software (boxy cars in the 80s, soap bars in the 90s, and the last few decades of cars with flowing designs with body line defining creases which modern A surface modelers seem to draw you towards). I find parts made in Blender with my workflow often look a lot more interesting and visually pleasing, using edge crease/bevel modifiers and sliding loops around vs. using fillets in CAD for instance, they both aim to soften an edge, but look far different in the end. If you are only ever going to 3D print parts and never CNC, you are already fast in Blender, and part strength vs mass doesn't matter much (especially to a degree where you don't care about FEA), Blender is plenty viable to make printed parts with.
You can footgun yourself easily with both programs, but I find Fusion to be worse for this, half because of the UI, but using tools like sketch projection for me has caused really diabolical issues in the timeline. The whole trick to CAD is being very careful with the design intention as you progress forwards, which is hard to learn coming from 3D modelers where that doesn't matter much and you can just shuffle around non destructive modifiers. This might just be due to my own experience difference in the programs though, I definitely remember going down some roads in Blender I never returned from on meshes when I was learning, normally by either applying subdivision modifiers, doing too many loop cuts, or using a tri/n-gon somewhere thinking it wouldn't be an issue or I would fix it later.