Native .step file import.
I think Blender could really benefit by having a native .step file importer. I know a lot of people in the engineering/CAD world that would like to use Blender but no good way to get their files across without an addon. A lot of engineers won't spend the time to track down an addon, they'll just use something else.
The CAD market is very large to say the least and attracting some of them to use Blender as their visualizer would certainly grow the community (and hopefully the donations).
2 Comments
This would imply a whole system to perform the "meshing" of CAD surfaces, this is usually done by the CAD exporting software
Of course it would, but that would be the whole point of it. CAD systems like Inventor and Solidworks give very limited or no control over meshing in other mesh formats like .stl or glTF.
There is a Blender addon that does a fairly good job already. However, in a large engineering firm it's a pain to get approval for unknown software. If .step was built in, that would remove a road block for many.
The user base for CAD is enormous and the most common format for transfer is .step for any solid modeling system. Just saying that Blender could increase it's user base by supporting that.