• I use FreeCAD and OpenSCAD when you can write code instead of draw.
• Hardware design software is complicated because of hardware patents. For simulation there is Octave, scilab, sympy, einsteinpy and other python projects.
• For video there is openshot.
• For audio production there is Sonic Pi, strudel, where you write music by writing code. There is also audacity and fluidsynth. The problem is with VST plugins but it's also problem of standard because VST was created by Steinberg. There is no single software so you need to juggle.
• For office there are alternatives like OnlyOffice and fork Euro Office, I've seen at least one more office packet from India.

Opensource software have no budget and no money, not to mention marketing budget, people make it to use it and share not to sell it. When company dies you end up with no software if it's cloud based or some installer on deprecated operating system. With opensource you can always take the source code and port it to new OS. One opensource project dies, some other is building on it's ashes. You can't kill it as long as at least one person use it and develops it.

For ex. elastive wave mode solver if you mean dispersion calculator you can load matlab files to Gnu Octave or look up some specific waves by typing above projects I mentioned with github in search.

Of course it's much harder than just type to google what you want and pay money to company that have marketing division and worked out SEO to be first on list. Especially if you have business income that backs it up and limited time, just pay to get it done. It's obvious choice. I assume people are sane. But you can pretty much find all the scientific equivalents on univeristy websites or on github if you really put some effort. It won't be perfect because there was no support that someone paid to solve specific business use case but if you contribute to opensource it will improve and if not you over time someone will do it.

Like someone mentioned the process is much slower but eventually it will always win because it's not so much tied to money.

I actually think AI development is going to close a lot of these gaps faster than people think.

And I think the options for audio and office are pretty decent, LibreOffice definitely does all that I need and there's a healthy community of musicians and audio enthusiasts building things in Linux.

Hardware design and CAD have the additional blockers that they require physical manufacturing and open source hardware has a long, long ways to go. Without an ability to actually produce the physical goods, open source software doesn't go anywhere. Kind of a bootstrapping problem.

OpenOffice is dead since Apache owns it, you should look in to OnlyOffice or LibreOffice instead

people use fruity loops after mid 90s kid highschool era?

@FizzyOrange @vane randomly re-ordered your bullet points? as someone who has to use the latest MS office on my work computer that sounds like they nailed acting like MS office to me.....word does that ALL the time when I'm trying to review documents, lol