Every CAD program has buttons for functions you may never use for the types of objects you design. A lot of commercial CAD has taken the approach of defaulting to a basic limited set of buttons that most people use. You can usually customize the interface to add any extra functionality you need. FreeCAD puts everything out there by default and you also have the option to customize to your needs. How can they possibly know what you need? As soon as they leave something out, they’ll be crucified for it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
With respect to tutorials “droning on about useless shit”, I’ll bet there are a lot of fundamentals being explained that are critical to understanding typical CAD workflows. It’s not just FreeCAD. These same fundamentals apply to SolidWorks, Creo, Onshape, F360, etc… It’s all generally the same.
The people that I see complain about FreeCAD often say they have no experience and that it’s because FreeCAD is somehow bad. I use SolidWorks every day at work and I use FreeCAD at home. I had no trouble learning FreeCAD because the modeling methods are the same. All CAD shares some common problems that you learn to avoid by experience. However, you need to learn the basics and make some mistakes to get good at it.
Many people start with intensely complex parts and get upset when they can’t make what they want. Practice with easy parts and experiment with different methods. Often, there is more than one way to make something in CAD. Some might be better than others, but it’s situationally dependent.
Learn the basics, practice, and keep learning and you’ll be fine regardless of what CAD you use.
You don’t even have to touch any “advanced” modeling features for FreeCAD to be useful. I primarily use extrudes and revolves of sketches in the Part Design workbench. The workflow is exactly the same as what I do at work every day in SolidWorks.
FreeCAD doesn’t let you be as loosey-goosey with geometry as some commercial software. That’s because they don’t have an army of developers paid to work on “nicety” features like that.
I can break SolidWorks models the same way that I can break FreeCAD models. No CAD software is immune to this. Some fail more gracefully than others. It doesn’t mean it’s unusable. You should have seen the repairs I had to make to a SolidWorks model today because I needed to convert a generic extruded feature into a sheetmetal feature…. It took a few minutes, but it’s no different than fixing things in FreeCAD because you changed the design.