Stringing is unavoidable with bowden extruders. Don’t waste time trying to fix it.

Blender is well received in the industry and can compete with the best. It also has a few nice features that aren’t standard and make it stand out among the competition.

FreeCAD is none of that.

Fusion 360 is amazing in the Getting Shit Done^tm department, which is the weak point of FreeCAD. I have managed to steer through the byzantine UI of FreeCAD to create a CAD model, but it needed support by someone who has spent years in that application to get the more complex stuff, and even he didn’t exactly know how to achieve it, and that’s on top of me having participated in a 16 hour workshop on how to use FreeCAD. For Fusion 360, I’ve watched a few 5 minute videos on their official channel and that’s it, everything else I was able to accomplish through just looking at the UI.

I learned Fusion 360 before FreeCAD, so it’s not just that I had prior experience in another similar tool.

I think the basic problem with FreeCAD is that it’s a collection of tool benches written by different people who don’t talk to each other. They have overlapping responsibilities while still having vastly different feature sets and don’t integrate with each other most of the time. So, if you want to create a model, you first have to plan ahead to understand what kind of features it’s going to have, and based on that, you have to decide which collection of tool benches you have to pick. More than once I picked the wrong one in the start and then had to do everything all over again in the different one once I ran into a dead end.

Fusion 360 feels like it was written by a single team with a single vision, and everything fits together.

The problem with FreeCAD is that the UI is abysmal. There is tons of duplicate functionality in different benches, but if you start in one you might discover that it doesn’t have what you need and have to start over in another.

The trick is to include a wedge in the base of the print, then you don’t need much force. The standard base plate generated by ChiTuBox does have one already.

I question your definition of flat.

I’m always using a plastic spatula, so mine is pristine.

I got this one, but they need some significant sanding, otherwise nothing will stick to them. They’re very cheap with worldwide free shipping, though.

So, pay extra to get the smallest components possible for a desktop PC, and then mount them spread out on a giant wall.