I agree completely. Very cumbersome. It works but it makes me feel like I'm litterally not smart enough or good enough to use it properly or well. If you want to invest a lot of money in training, a lot of mental effort for weeks months and years, and to struggle with un-ending, horrible feelings of personal inadequacy as you get some quality work done, Mastercam has totally done that for me. I don't have experience with other programs to know what the golden star in CAM is, but I wish I knew what it was because I would love to use a program that let me feel comfortable with my life, and that I felt confident in.
Mastercam gives me the feeling that what CNC needs in the world is a solution to CAM, not a better or more capable machine. Capable machines are everywhere. Capable and well thought out CAM is difficult or impossible to find.
I did invest a week of my life in Topsolid and paid $2000 for training and was prepared to pay $38,000 for a better solution, but at the end of that, I felt that Topsolid had some serious advantages and more serious disadvantages to Mastercam and I had problems with installing (getting it to run in Windows), and with toolpathing (I was unable to get toolpath) on a simple Y axis part in Topsolid (I was, as far as I know, doing everything right, but it was not posting toolpath). Topsolid had awesome CAD compared to Mastercam, but I needed it to solve WCS issues, solid toolpathing issues, and to be better and easier to work with for toolpathing than mastercam and that didn't happen.
In mastercam the WCS is not something explained by mastercam. Many operations require 2 planes in a specific format and this is a source of many issues. The posts don't know what the machine can or can't do, so you have to constantly drive that with WCS input using a tool that I don't perfectly grasp. Stock relativity isn't automatic so that can produce code that isn't efficient or make you struggle with telling the software what you want done. On the multi-axis side you just have to be a straight up savant to drive toolpathing- and the program can do it but there might be 50-100 people in the USA who can actually drive it reliably, so the rest of the people are paying for it so they can do 2D dynamic milling. In multi-axis, a solid surface may have to be depicted using a surface mesh or something, in short it is the extra steps that mastercam needs for prep that are the hardest functions of mastercam that most limit its capabilities.
Mastercam is like a keep in memory game where someone wants you to memorize an entire set of encyclopedias. It makes you feel like there literally isn't enough space in your head to keep the information there.
I've seen Titan show one part that would have been totally impossible in Mastercam. I think they use Fusion 360 or the multiaxis version of that. That was a 3D part on a multiaxis lathe- AKA a 3D part wrapped around the C axis. Granted I don't know how people learn that product, or how easy that was to program, so it's kind of like an unknown.
Training for mastercam is a minimum of $1000 a day, and if you wanted to support a machine shop ( a typical shop with multiaxis mills, multiaxis lathes, and EDM machines), you would adequately be trained by 40-60 days of training. That's $40-60K and your time which is probably also valuable. So CAM might be the largest investment you make if you do it right which you may or may not even have time or money for. There is a point where you become terrified of spending thousands of dollars a week and not absorbing information. If you didn't grasp it you just paid for ZERO.