Hi Rob, thanks for the kind words.

The stuff that you're describing is totally aligned with the intent of MoI - you sound like practically the model user for it! So please post any feedback you have about it here, stuff that you find awkward, etc.. I'd really like to get it tuned up for the type of work that you describe.

That said, it's not going to be a total cakewalk for people who have never used any CAD or 3D before, there is still going to be a learning curve. I've tried to minimize this by a lot of little things - for instance having text labels with every icon so you don't have to guess what the cryptic icons mean or hover for tooltips all the time. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if quite a few people still find it difficult anyway. If this happens for your group, I'd certainly be interested to know what seem to be the most confusing parts...

re: price - this hasn't been totally nailed down yet, but the general plan is that it will be quite a bit on the low end of the spectrum. Probably the V1 release will be missing a lot of features that are normally in CAD programs, such as printing or annotative dimensions, so I'm expecting that a lot of people will want to use it in combination with other programs, and the price will reflect that. Sorry I'm not quite ready to give any actual figures yet. But I don't think you have anything to worry about.