Interesting thoughts on Inventor. My workplace was Rhino only until we recently brought Inventor in. Rhino was just too lacking in design for manufacturing and never mind actually supporting our in house manufacturing. With that said, our work is much closer to architectural steel construction than classic industrial design. Right now our projects seem to be going towards massive assemblies of 10+k parts where most of the parts aren’t complex at all.
It’s been a while since I’ve used Solidworks and never delved very deep into its surfacing capabilities. Inventor has a lot to offer in terms of surfacing. It feels like the program actually understands curvature continuity at a pretty deep level and allows you to apply curvature continuity as a constraint but goes a bit further than Solidworks by applying it to features. For example, you can create a loft between two existing surfaces and force curvature continuity between the existing surfaces and adjust the blend. Very similar to Rhino’s blendsrf. Of course, T-spline is really nice for creating freeform shapes.
With that said, I find parts of the Inventor UI to be annoying and possibly shows Autodesk’s roots in the construction industry where parts are very simple. For example, constraints in sketches quickly get out of hand as the only way to interact with them is through the little icons on your sketch. You can’t click on a piece of geometry and get it’s existing relations. Constraining assembly have similar issues as you select geometry and the program chooses the constraint for you… not necessarily what you wanted.
I don’t see any reason why Inventor couldn’t be used in a design setting. Of course, most of your talent will be used to Solidworks so there would be a bit of adaptation required. You’d also loose out on the capability to send your full parametric CAD model to outside people involved in a project. The price is pretty great though. The design collection is also good value by including Nastran FEA, HSM CAM, 3ds max, Fusion 360 and AutoCAD if you have use for any of those.
As for Fusion 360 outshining Inventor. I think it comes from how it managed expectations. People don’t want to hear about Inventor. It was second tier software for a long time and even now I wouldn’t rate it above other mechanical CAD packages. It’s also easy for people that use CAD in a professional setting to download the free licence of Fusion 360 for a side project at home. At least that’s what I did. I had a little project and gave Fusion 360 a shot and was blown away but what I was getting, essentially for free.
With that said, it’s hard to really understand what’s Autodesk’s strategy with Fusion 360 and Inventor. I don’t see them developing both products in parallel. Fusion 360 is starting to have really neat features that aren’t yet in Inventor but Fusion isn’t mature enough to have the boring stuff you need day to day down pat. Also, the cloud infrastructure is far from being a selling point in its current form.