I’m going to post a short discussion about CAD packages and some of the current trends I see. A little background on me, I was initially trained on a drafting table at community college and only briefly exposed to ProE as an undergrad at Penn State. At Caterpillar, we used Teamcenter and ProE for most 3D modeling work I was involved with.
Also, there are many, many good CAD tools out there now for anyone to get started using. The basic division of approaches to CAD falls into two methods: parametric and direct modeling. These two methods were part of sales pitches in the past and currently it’s hard to see the difference these days. All 3D modeling requires watertight shapes that are constrained in some way by dimensions or relationships. So really you should work with the one that best suits you. This being said and in an effort to give you more directions to try…
I’ve had good luck with the free tool, FreeCAD, to mess around in to make STL files for 3D printing or other process modeling. Recently, I’ve been using Onshape to look at collaborating with students on geometries and it looks really powerful. Seems like it’s going to be limited to educational accounts for the free use, but this serves almost like an educational PLM which is definitely a great idea. For other shapes and more open part sharing, I recommend Thingiverse and GrabCAD.
As for trends, it seems like the basics will stay the same so if you’re happy with your CAD tool then I wouldn’t panic. But as for upcoming innovations, I want to highlight some things. First, integrating process modeling (heat transfer, fluid flow, solid deformation) is likely to continue in the CAD package world. ProE, Solidworks, AutoCAD and others all have options for directly doing analysis from their CAD interface. Also all the process modeling software offer some modeling capabilities such as ANSYS and MAGMAsoft. But as an academic soothsayer, I would say that the future has to feature optimization and machine learning. In this way, OpenSCAD probably has an interesting role to play in the future. OpenSCAD creates geometry from a programming procedure essentially like parametric modeling but driven from written lines of code instead of point and click operations. This approach and other software that uses this method has huge value to optimization because the parameters can be modified easily to experiment with the design.
I’ve got more to say on this considering implicit and explicit geometry but I’ll leave that for a future post.
Dr Monroe Thoughts 
Well you hit the nail on the head. I think CAD companies a missing a huge aspect that I have shown you (*Preface: I am one of Charlie’s former students). The parametric aspect of CAD modeling is nearly nonexistent among the “leaders” in CAD modeling. You have to roll back the model to make adjustments. I will stay it definitely more complicated then just adding the functionality because I code these objects and trying to predict situations that will break the object
are hard to find. I think you will see more feature base or object based orientation for each industry.