Serious question, is hand drafting still worth learning for anyone under 30?

I've been on both sides of this. My shop in Tulsa still takes hand-drawn sketches from two old-timers and they're cleaner than half the CAD files we get. But last month I had a kid fresh out of trade school who couldn't lay out a simple 3-view on paper, and he was useless until the mentor walked him through it. So which is it, are we wasting time teaching manual drafting or are we stupid for letting it die? Anyone here actually use a drafting board weekly in 2024, or is it just nostalgia?

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wadebailey1mo ago

Hasn't everyone seen that exact thing play out? I swear the pencil guys catch stuff nobody else does because they have to think the whole shape through before they put a line down. I watch kids zoom in on a tiny corner of a CAD model and totally miss that the whole bracket is backwards. Manual drafting forces you to see the big picture, and that skill carries over no matter what tool you use. My advice is to keep it in the mix as a thinking tool, not a production tool. You don't need to be fast on a board, but you need to know how a 3-view actually works before you can fake it on a screen.