The DXF importer is an ok add-on but it would much more useful is was capable of importing "toolpath". By this I mean the real 3D toolpath geometry and with that, the bit info needed to machine the board. No need for any manual input in designer to set anything, either drilling, select bit and depth params, cut path or what have you.
Designer is well though of and simple enough to use for carving but anything else other then relatively simple machining, it's pretty limited to say the least and we have to resort to all sorts of skeems to get it to machine what we want. I can think of many standard machining operations, like drilling a hole pattern, either circular, polygonal, array, along a path or whatever that are pretty easy to create in a cad (cam) program but all this work is basically lost because the drilling features of designer can't figure out the imported geometry and can't even snap to the center of these circles. Yes, it's fairly easy to reproduce our work manually in designer when the machining require just a few holes but it becomes a nightmare pretty fast as the number of holes increase. Operation like dados, stop dados, pockects and many others can be done manually in designer but the same reasoning apply here as well for simple things it's ok but as complexity increase it become exponentialy time consuming and frustrating especially when you know it can be done pretty easily in other CAD/CAM packages even free ones.
Basically what I would like is a mean to create all other types of machining operation as easily and simply as it is with carving stuff.
In case some of you mention it, yes I know about ai2mpc and it can simplify our life a little bit but it's still pretty far from what I would like. You can add to that, either AI2MPC or designer itself offset the geometry you created by a small amount, on recent Windows hardware and software it's basically impossible to create the AI files AI2MPC requires other then manually unless of course you are willing to pay about $500 or more for the latest Illustrator package and still CS5.1 saved to version 8 with attributes set don't work. This is not a real solution IMHO, it's more a kind of akward workaround solution if not a total waste of time and money.
Thanks,
Felix