They only recently (a year ago) released v1 of FreeCAD.
Blender 2.5 came out ~15 years ago, and as I was learning Blender in 2010/2011 it did not feel nearly as good as it does now. I believe that something similar could happen with FreeCAD, as I tried it some years ago and it was unusable in my opinion, but now I can work with it without any major issues. And the more attention they get, the better it will become.
No they probably do mean the jump between the interface in 2.49 which was somewhat unique and very, very different to the current UI, to that in 2.5 which the current interface mostly resembles. 2.8 was a smaller jump that introduced left click select as the default, along with various cosmetic enhancements and a rework of the depsgraph.No idea what you're talking about with contexts being selected in the middle of the screen etc. I suspect you're using "context" in a way unique to you
No it was definitely Blender 2.8, and honestly the buzz around 2.8 was substantial in gamedev circles that hadn't talked much about Blender before (rather complained about the Autodesk monopoly).
Just compare the 2 videos below,
2.8, here the layout/modelling/sculpting/UV-edit/animation,etc workload tabs are on top (main workload context), to the top-left inside the viewport you notice object mode (that can change to mesh,mode,etc), in mesh-mode iirc the vertex/line/face selection will then appear inside the viewport to the right of the mode selector (so reading workload/mode/option goes top->down, left->right and all contained in the upper part of the UI).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILqOWe3zAbk&list=PLa1F2ddGya...
Now let's go back to 2.7, here you notice that object/mesh-mode selector (2nd level context) is at the bottom just above the timeline view.
Heck knows where the workload and vertex/line/face modes are (was it windows presents or smth like that?), but I distinctly remember being dumbfounded by their relative locations when I realized where they were when I went back to research why I hated blender previously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6KPrc4uMw
Now if you consider that cosmetic, sure you were probably a fan from before and managed by key shortcuts, but from a general UI perspective that makes the difference from being stumped by random locations of things to being able to get things done from the get-go with previous 3d modelling knowledge without reading the entire manual.
I think GP is referring to the 2.9 release (or was it 2.8 or 3.0?) that had a major UI overhaul a few years back, I would say that the real explosion of Blender usage co-incided with that release.
Coming from 3ds, 3dsmax and Lightwave mainly (some Maya), I had previously tried Blender a couple of times and usually rage-quite within 15 minutes due to the flaky-feeling UI.
After actually using that big UI release I went back to the previous major release to see what I had missed.
The general context (mesh mode->mesh edit->vertices) that in newer releases is placed somewhat in a sane order, was placed so that your major context was selected in the _middle of the screen_, then secondary was at the top and tertiary somewhere else.
That's just a big no-no in terms of UI design but had probably made some sense when Blender evolved and people who got used to Blender had probably internalized it (and staunchly defended it).