[Basel A]

When I was doing a lot of CAD at my job last summer, I loved using a 3D mouse. There's some learning curve, but it's absurdly fast at a constant task (rotation/panning/other movement). It also avoids having to think about whether rotate or pan is the default mouse wheel click behaviour (it's different between Inventor and Solidworks). Altogether, it definitely made me faster (and this was in my 8th year of doing CAD).

I did find the default controls to be unintuitive. When you rotate down, the object shouldn't rotate up. It's like scrolling on an Apple mouse. Once I flipped the controls, the learning curve wasn't bad at all.