Yeah, the different, incompatible assembly plugins is why I stopped using FreeCAD a few years ago.
That's reportedly been fixed (guess they picked a winner?), but I haven't taken a look since. I probably will, at some point, but I generally have a different focus these days.
They didn't pick a winner. They (Ondsel and others) evaluated all the workbenches, chose the best ideas and built a new workbench around a new (well, new to C++) solver.
It is. The chap they hired to do port his solver has done really great motion solving work in the past (and, amusingly, had an application called "FreeCAD" before FreeCAD existed).
