You’re the OP, I think you have discretion to digress! 
As long as we’re digressing, I’ll help!
I agree about liking KiCad, though without the Eagle experience to compare. I picked it up some years ago for circuit design and since that time it went from definitely usable to really good IMHO. The new canvas made a huge difference in usability when it became stable enough.
I have a rather different perspective from @donkjr here on Free Software. I don’t see a huge correlation between quality and freedom in the software world overall. I’ve been in both the free and proprietary software worlds across my career, and I’ve been deep into a lot of free and proprietary code. Most of the best code I’ve seen has been open source, but overall there’s plenty of great code and plenty of terrible code in both worlds. Open source doesn’t guarantee quality any more than proprietary. When it comes to security, open source doesn’t guarantee security, but well-used open source is more likely to be secure than similar proprietary software. (I have years of experience with a primary job responsibility in software security in both free and proprietary software, so I’m not just pontificating from an armchair here.)
I will say that it’s not clear to me that I’ve overall gotten better support on problems and usage when paying a software license fee either. You pay one way or the other; time is famously money. I’d say with open source for which you are not paying $$ for support, you often have to invest substantial into making a good question, because no one is being paid to figure out what you are asking. On the other hand, I’ve noted that when I’m paying for software, I get much better and faster responses when I invest that effort in the question. So you might not want to invest that time and thus want someone to be paid to interpret the question, and I might choose to invest that time because I’m a control freak.
When it comes to perpetual licenses, Alibre and LightBurn are examples of intelligently splitting the difference: You are buying a perpetual license to the software you get now; but pay annually to get updates. (I’ll note that @LightBurn gets annoyed when people say that you have to pay an annual fee to use Lightburn.) This is matched reasonably to costs and so it is possible to build a sustainable business that way. This is really true both for proprietary and open source software. Red Hat does something like this, except that the base perpetual license for the underlying technology is provided universally and free of cost, but the product built on top of it is still sold and supported with a recurring fee.
Certainly there is not always an equivalent open source software offering for every proprietary offering; the reverse is of course also true.
I will note that learning some Solidworks made me better at FreeCAD and I’m glad to have access to both tools. Solidworks makes some things super easy, and it shows attention to detail on workflow that’s missing on FreeCAD. On the other hand, my impression is that it crashes more often than any beta version of FreeCAD I’ve ever run, and even when it doesn’t crash outright often ends up with bad internal state that magically is fixed by save/quit/restart. So it’s definitely more polished than FreeCAD, and workflow is faster, and I’ve seen some things work in Solidworks that don’t in FreeCAD (creating a shell is more reliable in Solidworks in my experience) but the quality story is more subtle than a simple binary comparison here. FreeCAD takes way more mouse clicks though! The UX is definitely not polished.
In the linkstage (realthunder) branch of freecad, I’ve so far found it easier to repair topological naming problems than in Solidworks. Solidworks models with topological problems just change shape and sometimes it takes me some spelunking to figure out what went wrong; in the freecad realthunder branch when there is an unavoidable topological naming problem, the model quits reacting and holds its old shape for each now-invalid node until you fix the problem from the first affected node. Makes debugging sane once you understand what it’s doing, IMHO.
(Opinions worth every penny you paid for them…)