So called half-baked.
Sculpt Mode brushes were already perceived as an enhanced Proportional Editing before Pablo’s arrival.
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My bad, totally forgot Pablo’s Face Set tools, and changelogs 
Still, i can see tools in sculpt mode behave more for organic sculpt (hence no offset even) and not for geometric sculpt (like in edit mode).
@stargeizer The point is, with the addition of the tools I mentioned, sculpt mode would be also good enough for basic hard-surface modeling, which would be huge cuz of the better performance etc…
Also don’t forget that you can already perform some interesting boolean operations in sculpt mode:
so yeah, the raw mesh editing in sculpt mode is half way there already… it just needs a little push… 
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In areas like hard-surface modeling and arch-vis though, it is often preferable to have the more deliberate and more precise methodology that comes naturally with traditional modeling tools like seen with editmode. This is especially true if the model is to have subdivision surfacing (which last I checked is not an operation that works smoothly with concave faces, or faces with more than 5 edges for that matter).
Try to make something like a staircase, a building, or furniture with perfect proportions with brushes, can it even be done without adding a lot of bloat to sculpt mode?
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You miss the point… there’s no competition between edit/sculpt mode here…
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If I’m correct in assuming that @TheRedWaxPolice is talking about sculpt mode without multi-res then this might very well be possible. Perhaps not easy, but potentially possible. With multires, maybe - at least some of it. So long as the mesh remains manifold. No holes.
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Yes of course…
Even in zbrush, most of those zmodeler operations cannot be done in a mesh with subdivisions… 
Big news everyone! We are going back to edit mode & co.
In core-module chat Brecht mentioned plans for future 3.x releses (NOT 3.0). However, please bear in mind that this is not agreed upon by other developers, so things might change.
Considered tasks are:
Blender editing performance with many datablocks.
https://developer.blender.org/T73359
Improvements for undo!
This task wasn’t linked by Brecht, but I believe this is roughly what he had in mind, please correct me if I’m wrong.
https://developer.blender.org/T83806
And Collections for Import/Export.
https://developer.blender.org/T68933
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Yeah 3DS Max is definitely way beyond blender in FPS/performance as some have said. No question.
Although, I’ve used max for 15-20 years, and after using Blender lately, I still prefer Blenders overall workflows, or feels more fluid to me now.
Max is super powerful, but is feeling aged/their modifier panel is lagging alot for me / their scene scale messes with tools alot sometimes/gets finicky. At least at the size/scale we use for my day job.
Also on average max has crashed/had more issues for me than Blender lately, and takes much much longer to startup than Blender.
But again, I do hope as well, that Blender mesh performance improves alot more and especially Undo performance in some cases.
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Yeah, 3DS’s control / gizmo interface is archaic as hell too. That is part of what makes it so stressful to use now.
But the performance still smashes blenders for editing. So does Maya currently.
Blenders work flow is nice too that is the sad part. I, like many, hope to see it be equivalent to or surpass the current giants. Cause I can’t wait to get away from Maya’s terrible smoothing group control lol
But the mesh editing performance for me matters more so. 
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Some have said at work, how bad Maya can be with dense geo vs max, but I’ve not used Maya enough to say.
Blender I feel can handle alot of geo for viewport navigation. But in edit mode and toggling. Yeah. Can lag a lot or slow down. But like some also said. Sculpt mode is very different sometimes/ much faster too.
Also blenders import / export of FBX is killer. Killer as in…. Slow as hell. Haha. Not sure why it’s so slow. Literally 10x slower than most other programs I’ve used. I can export or import into max in like 30 seconds. Same mesh takes 5-10 minutes with blender. I’m often exporting 15-30million poly meshes from blender to max or toolbag to bake at the end.
Maybe there’s a faster format. But fbx has support for transforms / scale and other things. Maybe USD or whatever it’s called. One of those will be the go to format in the future.
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The reason why Blender does not have proper .fbx support is because the actual SDK is closed source.
The GPL license literally prevents Blender from deeply integrating anything that is not FOSS (and the license is designed to be close to impossible to get rid of after a while), so your only hope is the expanding use of open formats such as USD, Alembic, and GlTF. I do believe Autodesk is aware of this and has used its clout in I/O to try to kneecap Blender’s appeal in professional pipelines.
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It’s because all of Blender’s older importer/exporters(including FBX) are pure Python and it’s really, really slow vs. compiled code. From my experience writing an importer, data creation in Blender with the Python API is slow too. The operations just take forever when there are a lot of objects. Hoping some of the enhancements to the datablocks will speed this kind of stuff up.
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Maya can handle as much Geo as 3ds can. I’ve tested in both, and quite experienced with either of them. You can hit millions and animate / model in either but… I mean… Realistically… You’re not modelling in the million mark. It never lags, have yet to see it. But in blender… 50k to 60k quads and you start getting massive edit performance problems. 3ds and Maya… Neither experience those problems. Tested on today’s modern hardware. I keep checking back in hopes it gets on par.
My studio is mainly Maya. I use Maya /blender though. Blender helps the smoothing groups issue a bit for where Maya gets a bit careless. Everything else, classic Maya and zbrush workflow.
Yeah I hear ya there. No drag and drop fbx stuff either for blender. Definitely meh 
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Yeah I may have to switch to another format. Or should be fine. As long as I can get into max ok. I could use OBJ. But funny enough, it might be faster to export obj from blender now maybe, but 3ds max is horribly slow with obj in my experience yet.
Also Maxs multi object UV has been pretty laggy compared to blender. I definitely like Maya and blenders UV editor being always available and not a modifier.
Max 2022 or whatever they are on now, might be faster but haven’t used it enough yet. For UVs I mean. I was using 2016 yet until very recently and now we got forced to use 2018. But that may even expire soon enough too.
In Blender when the object origin is very far away from the actual geometry it can get very finicky when grabbing and moving for me. I really hope the Blender startup time can be decreased along with the introduction of the Asset Browser. I’ve been testing it out and opening/closing the files containing the assets to make minor tweaks is annoying due to Blender instances taking just a few seconds too long for my liking to startup.
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I’ve been experimenting with having 1 scene with 1 object in edit mode and another scene in another main window in object mode and a geometry nodes based clone of that first object. So I can rearrange all objects in object mode in the 2nd window while never leaving edit mode of that first object in the first window. This way there’s not annoying 5 second wait when switching from edit/sculpt mode to object mode. Sometimes the first few sculpting strokes don’t register in the 2nd window though.
I am a total amateur though and have no production quality files to experiment with so this might not actually be practical for real work.
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May I ask which version of Blender you are using? Because when I edit 100k-200k quads in 2.93 it is completely smooth. No edit mode performance issues whatsoever (v2.93 improved edit mode performance quite considerably compared to v2.92).
The upcoming v3 is much ahead of 2.93 again.
I tested the raw edit mode performance of Blender v3 alpha a while ago with LightWave, Cinema4D, Maya, Houdini, and Max, and Blender performed equally well compared to Maya, Cinema4D and Houdini with 400K faces. It depends somewhat on the type of operation. At higher poly counts (~2 million faces scanned object) Blender outpaces Maya and Cinema4D when it must transform all that selected data.
But true enough, Max is in a league of its own when it comes down to pure mesh editing performance. Nothing comes close.
Anyway, I cannot agree with Blender having massive edit performance problems. 50K-60K quads poses no problems whatsoever.
This is unfortunately more often than not unusable because it’s extremely slow on anything else than very low poly meshes 
I wish this exact tool was available, but worked on voxel boolean level rather than mesh boolean level, like the “line project” tool does. That would give faster, more stable and much cleaner result.