Chris
I'm sure StyleBuilder does work OK eventually.
But read your previous posts. Architects design buildings. But we have to learn AutoCad, SketchUp, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Revit, & Rhino, for starters, and they take months to get good at, before the vendor changes something.
We're supposed to be making sure that the building works, that it functions properly. That the customers can find the front door and that the bathrooms are accessible and the adjacencies work and that it won't cost too much and that there is enough parking and that it meets code. So what do we spend our time doing? Trying to figure out why our software program keeps crashing when we zoom in, and why this point won't connect with that one. Or why our renders have zaggies, our shaders don't shade or why our topo map doesn't drape. We spend a month modeling a building and then can't output the results properly, due to some obscure behavior by some software that hasn't been updated because the vendor isn't in business anymore or doesn't support the hardware. Patience? I have a lot, but it's not infinite, and this is crazy, it really is.
And does having these skills help you gain employment? No. The AIA can decide who works and who doesn't work, and for any reason at all. Discrimination is blatant - obvious - and the AIA has gone to court to defend the right of its professional member architects to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, age & sexual orientation, which many firms do quite openly. I took the AIA to small claims court to challenge this practice, and they sued me back in superior court to show their appreciation and thanks. What a great bunch, huh? Really makes one proud to be an American architect these days.
Meanwhile, the software companies keep promising how wonderful their stuff is and how much more productive you'll be with the next upgrade, as long as you have patience until the upgrade after that.
So forgive me if I'm pissed off, because I am. StyleBuilder is just one symptom of a much bigger problem.
Cheers!