Where's the Inventor love here...?;)

You don't need all those buttons. I have ~40 buttons on my toolbar, and in a given day, I use probably 6 of them. Dimensioning and the occasional osnap button. The rest I use all command line.

On top of that, programmers can have field day creating routines for multiple use things. A guy that sits near me amazes me with how fast he gets things done because of all the scripts he has written.

Well there is Catia and Inventor in my schools computer lab....
Catia the more powerful one and inventor the easy one...
@Home i use SurfaceStudio 10.1.1 and i love it, perfect toolset along w/ spacious UI.

UG, IDEAS, ProE - these are the letters I love.

Although I always thought Inventer does a better job of "teaching" or "training" people for the bigger CAD systems than the AutoCAD arm of Autodesk.

BrianCAD, the CAD program I wrote in grad school based on the AutoDesk Kernal, blew. I don't recommend it to anyone. Of course, I have the only copy on a zip disk.

Since somebody revived this long dead thread, I figure I'd upate my comments in alphabetical order:

AutoCad - I mostly stopped using it at v14 when I switched to Inventor. Having two different sorts of solids was confusing and unecessary. There are occasionally things I want to do in wireframe. I use AutocCad for that because it is such a pain to do wireframe in Inventor

CADAM - an old 2.5D system. May it rest in peace. I certainly don't want to see it again. Even Catia 4 was better.

Catia 4 - Kludge to the max. It feels like they just added functions any old way as they figured out they were needed. I was never comfortable with it and am busy trying to forget I ever learned it. Just in case anybody should ever try and have me use it again. I think I've been scarred for life by it.

Catia 5 - 5 isn't perfect by a long shot. But it is so much better put together than 4 that the contrast is like going from Death Valley to Hawaii.

Inventor - Very similar to Catia 5. You think in much the same way. I can use one at home and the other at work with no problems. I haven't done any surfacing in Inventor while I have done a fair amount in the systems I use at work. So I can't compare that real well. But my impression is that it is a little weak.
Not that FIRST teams typically need much in the way of NURBS surfaces.

NCAD - This proprietary 3D system, developed and used by Northrop, was years ahead of it's time. It was developed by Northrop because a 3D system that could do NURBS didn't exist at the time. Too bad it was only surface and wire frame. The user interface was driven by the designers, not the programmers and many of us who used it are still wishing the new programs would return to it. In spite of the FORTAN based graphics. Elements of this system are still in use for specialized functions (like lofting, generating the outside surface of the airplane) here at Northrop Grumman.

Pro-E - I'm still learning this system. The assemby functions are pretty easy to use compared to Catia, Inventor, and UG. I have a little trouble with the "prehighlighting" stuff. But that will clear up with practice. This will probably become the BeachBot's standard because EVERYBODY can get a copy and we can all be on the same version. In years past it had a reputation for being weak on surfaces, which was why Northrop Grumman has never adopted it. I haven't gotten that far yet.

Unigraphics - I was a big UG fan until I started using Catia 5 and we ugraded to UG18. Actually I think it was a downgrade, they really screwed up the sketcher. I liked the sketcher in 15 much better. Sorry Andy.

Every CAD system has it's strengths and weaknesses. Some will be easier for one person than another. Which system is best for you depends largely on what you are trying to do with it. These days I recommend that students learn any solid modeler they can and become proficient at it. The first one is the hardest to learn, all the rest are easier after that. I think NASA JPL has the right philosophy. They hire designers. They don't care what CAD systems they know, as long as they know at least one well. They figure it is better to just retrain an experienced designer for whatever CAD system that program happens to be using. It is the designers knowledge and experience they want.