Have to be honest, not a big fan of LayOut myself. I am so fast at SketchUp my boss was open-mouthed for 5 minutes, while he watched me work the first time. But LayOut is just dragging the workflow. So many things that I’d like to be changed as well to bring it up to SketchUp’s level.
It might seem strange, but I agree with both of you.
Layout should emulate sketchup, shouldn’t break the workflow for it’s heaviness and unintuitive use, and with the mentioned features could challenge CAD.
Sketchup could have better handling of dwg, linestyles, inferences that work better in 2d ortho views where faces are perpendicular to camera and lockeable orbit in scenes, and it would fit more workflows on architecture.
Apart from Layout, changes needed in SU, don’t seem that big.
I don’t use Layout much either but I have to read a to of 2D drawings which I do in SU. A company I do a lot of work with use autocad lite. Importing their drawings into SU is ok but as you say @gsharp there is often lots of work to do to make the drawings workable.
This workload would easen up very much if each CAD layer would translate to a group/component named after the layer in SU outliner.
Also if that group would be layered in SU with a layer named as CAD, so we can easily control vosibility.
It would also help if text was imported, even if as 3d text.
Reloading the CAD file, could update each group/component, seamlessly, without us having to replace the imported file.
This would make our CAD layers xrefed inside SU and thus, collaboration easier.
Finally, exporting a CAD file would create a file where curves would be true curves, circles and arcs too, and even polylines. 3d text would translate back to cad text, leaders and dims too…
If this was the case, I would work in 3d and easily colaborate with consultants in their awful 2d world.