What was the best part about using CATIA?
CATIA is a very powerful modelling program. It offers a wealth of modelling tools, both in surfacing and in solid modelling, good CFD and stress tools. You can create any shape you can think of using CATIA. It is better than most systems at managing large assemblies. By my opinion, CATIA is a very good software and one of the best in their area of work.
What would you change about your experience with CATIA?
The worst thing about using CATIA is the interface. The program is not very user - friendly, and simple tasks in other programs seem no longer simple in CATIA. The hardware libraries are fairly useful, but not easy to set up. About other things, i don't think this is a bad choice.
Overall Feedback
While the initial learning curve was a little steep, if you have past experience with other programs (for instance Solidworks and AutoCAD) it really becomes a matter of learning what the functions are called, Pad instead of Extrude, Pocket instead of Extrude-Cut, etc.
So I would recommend starting with a more user - friendly program like Solidworks, to get to know modelling in general, and then go ahead and start learning CATIA. It is quite painful to use, but it is a very powerful program. If you can imagine a shape, you can create it using CATIA. We design and manufacture a wide range of aerospace products, and by modelling using CATIA we are able to rapidly produce highly stylized parts as well as complex assemblies.