what is the right command(sequence) for adding new tool?

I think the CAM features (Path workbench) are relatively new to FreeCAD. Especially the adaptive tool pathing (HSM) only were added with v0.18.

I'm no expert on FreeCAD, but it seems like some people are able to do some real and non-trivial work in it to me!

Sure! FreeCAD has several magnific developer, that realize fantastic things.
But when you have to apply changes, which are natural in long term projects, than freecad will corrupt your model and/or model history, without any chance of rollback ...
When you have a problem with freecad, its very likely, that you get the answer: thats not the problem of freecad, but of library xyz ...

But hey - that's my experience. May be you made others ...
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At that time i was not aware there is a CAM for it so i moved on to BlenderCAM, and this is a beast!

Well - blender is my workbench for fast shots as well for complex things.
I startet to learn blender at the same time as freecad. FreeCad could not convince me at all, but blender did it. FreeCAD developer blame blender for not being precise, nor CAD nor parametric ...
But the point for me is: blender never destroyed a model and I could modify anything after years - it allows own libraries and for so linking between different files and the layer system of blender is outstanding. Never saw something similar elsewhere

cheers Reinhard

I have not used FreeCAD long enough to have gotten screwed by version/update incompatibilities.

Were your update incompatibility problems between different release versions, or within one version? Problems like that between versions would be frustrating but not wholly unexpected. Within one version though, that would be totally unacceptable.

Hi Todd,

I think the same way as you - and yes, all problems happend within the same release.