I had Solid Works for many years as a student/faculty license. I never did like its "context sensitive" icons. I called them "jumping icons" and never could find the one(s) I needed where I expected them to be. My previous experience was with Vellum Cobalt, which was easy to use but the visual presentation was not as nice. The last version I had did not have color shading to give perspective. I migrated to the free version of Google Sketch-up and really liked it, once I got the hang of making "mates." Dimensioning was crappy on Google, but it was far easier to get a functional drawing on that than on Solid Works. My last version of Solid Works was 2007. Maybe it has become more user friendly, especially for us dyslexic types.
In about 2008, I tried a piece of 3D CAD software that advertised itself as "90% of Solid Works for 10% of the cost." As simple mate was impossible to do,compared to SW or Google. I ended up using SW for that project. I have not tried the commercial version of Sketch-Up.
John