Blender can do so many things. I personally use it to draw pretty things to be 3d printed, and then cast out of metal. But there are people who use it to composite things into live action footage, people who make game assets, and a lot more.
I'm mostly interested in a 3D printing suite as well.
I've been using SolidEdge for a few years and Fusion and also tried FreeCad but the latter also never really clicked for me.
I'm trying to find an open source solution - I understand that SolidEdge etc. are parametric and Blender is not. But I at least wanted to get good enough in Blender to make simple things (mostly functional, not pretty as in your case).
My 3D printing needs are not seriously complicated, so I've found that OpenSCAD to be the best solution for me. Because I'm a programmer, a workflow focused on programmatically generating geometry is very intuitive. Everything else I've tried is too cluttered and complicated for what I want to do. It's weak when it comes to organic geometry, but most of what I make isn't organic-looking. If I needed to make something more organic, I'd probably make the base model in OpenSCAD first and then bring it into Zbrush.
I've done some basics with OpenSCAD and it does well, but as soon as I want to do anything that isn't just a bunch of extruded polygons I run into trouble. Also the lack of chamfer and fillet functions is frustrating, even though I know I can use a custom function someone else wrote I don't like not understanding the math behind the code.
Blender can do so many things. I personally use it to draw pretty things to be 3d printed, and then cast out of metal. But there are people who use it to composite things into live action footage, people who make game assets, and a lot more.