Does anybody else find that the behavior of mates in Solidworks has gone from bad to worse to dismal over the last 12 years?
When I add a mate that overdefines an assembly and then try to cancel it in the warning dialog Solidworks tries to fix it anyway and breaks all my other mates anyway. Why does the program not actually cancel the mate attempt rather than attempt to "fix" the conflicting mate that I just said not to implement?
I also find that when I tell it to break other mates so that I can track down the conflict Solidworks will almost always blow up an assembly in bizarre and unrelated ways rather than focusing on the mate I tried to enter. I don't do complex assemblies, I generally am a pretty low-level user but I've been doing this for quite a long time now and am pretty proficient at basic mates. As it gets worse I find many of my assemblies are more Bandaid than patient. I'm sick of work-arounds (god save us from the dreaded "tangent" mate!), Come on Solidworks, step up to the plate. How about you dedicate some resources to making the product more robust for existing users rather than concentrating on adding bells and whistles to attract new ones. It'ssure looks to me like your development staff view fixing annoyances and problems as a part time job that they are forced to do against their will.