Have I sold my soul to the dark lords?

I have never been too fond of Autodesk as a company. I find their licensing to be very restricting and somewhat intrusive, especially when it comes to Maya (with which I have had the most experience)
for this reason I never really considered using any of their products even though I do quite a lot of digital 3d content creation.
I have always found blender to be both easier to use and much more acceptable from a software political point of view. This is not , i should stress, a matter of not wanting to pay. I pay money to the blender foundation and am currently considering a membership (i can probably afford a silver memebership atm)
Now that I bought a cnc-mill I was all for choosing either freecad or some similiar solution, but it turns out that they are all fairly rough or hard to install. Being a computer developer I have managed to install several of them for comparison, but a few days ago Hive account@beetlevc convinced me to try out fusion 360.

It is admittedly a fairly smooth experience. I chose a somewhat complicated stl mesh and decided to try and make tool paths for it. I dont have a lot of endmills yet and I am also waiting for my collets (I only have 8mm 6mm and 1/4 inch collets) so I have time to experiment with software before they arrive.
I imported/opened the mesh in fusion, got it oriented(a bit cumbersome but mainly because the interface was unknown to me) and then i found out that the scaling was off. I am still not sure why but it seems when i export the stl from blender I need to set the units to cm instead of my default mm. anyway scaling is not supported for meshes inside fusion unless you use the (experimental) mesh tools, and it turned out my mesh had to many vertices for it to work at all. so I did the scaling in blender and reimported the scaled mesh.

I then went to the CAM tools and started setting up my milling operations. It is very clear to me that these types of programs are made for engineers and not for artists. Thats ok for me since I am the closest thing to an engineer without actually being one, but I think it is a potential problem for a wider adaption of these techniques. I think what has happened with slicers , which is the 3dprinting equvalent of toolpaths is the way to go.
More readymade options and support for the most common machines, such as carbide3Ds shapeoko and nomad and the equivalents from inventables ; X-carve and carvey. If the cnc-community could get something like Cura for setting up their toolpaths I think it would help a broader adoption a lot.

One of the main reasons that this is not happening is probably that Fusion 360 is actually fairly well functioning, and even though it is not obvious from their homepage, it is actually possible to get a free license, that is valid for more than 30 days. I did the signup procedure and gave it a swing, and I was able to setup a milling operaqtion with a roughing using a 1/4 flat endmill and 3 refining toolpaths with a 2 mm ball end mill.

I have only shown one of the parallel refinement steps here but the other one is the same just along the other axis. I have not tried it out yet since I am still missing the endmills, but I was pleased with the results and fusion 360 takes care of raising warnings if you do something stupid like plunging so deep that the collet hits the material. There is still a lot to learn but I have a handhold now, and Iam much more positive now.
even if I choose another solution later, and I still might, it does feel a bit like selling my soul to the lord of darkness, I get to train my skills at CAM. Now I really need those milling bits to arrive!