The “proximity” menus were the default in GEM. I found them irritating, too, but I just learned to keep the mouse away from them when I didn’t want to use them. There were UIs on the ST that instead had you click to bring up menus, but they were custom, drawn in VDI, not using the GEM toolset/window manager.
I think I might’ve experienced what you said about “toy” tools recently, when I used FreeForm on my Mac to create a diagram. I could still pull it off, but I felt like I was using crayons where I needed a pen, to use an analogy. As an example, I wanted to draw a dashed line, something that I think any diagramming tool would have in a basic toolset, but it didn’t have that. So, instead, I drew a short, solid line, and then duplicated it a bunch of times to create my dashed line… Fortunately, FreeFrom has rather intuitive, automatic aligning actions you can use with objects, which helped.
Antic Software was a lifeline in my Atari 8-bit days. I bought a 130XE when I went off to school, and I needed some decent terminal software for getting onto the school’s computers. I happened to find Chameleon from Antic, terminal software for Atari 8-bits, at a computer store that sold second-hand software. I didn’t end up using it too much, but it gave me enough functionality, simulated 80-column display with VT-52 emulation, that I could log on to the school’s computers, access the Atari Archive through the internet, and download a free terminal program that fit my needs better, called VT-10Squared (a VT-100 emulator that generated an 80-column screen in software, using Graphics mode 8). Another neat 8-bit program from them was Colourspace. It didn’t do anything, other than draw neat, random graphic designs on the screen, which you could control a bit with a joystick. It was written by a prominent game author, Jeff Minter.
I heard of CAD-3D and Deluxe Paint. I didn’t know there was a pipeline you could set up, using a bunch of these applications together, to do video production. I saw 3D animation demos on the ST, but I didn’t know how they were put together. Interesting that this pipeline used a scripting engine. I wonder how that worked.
The marketing video was a bit interesting. I’m famiiiar with the “spin” techique for generating symmetrical 3D objects, since I remember typing in an Atari Basic program once on my 130XE, probably from Antic Magazine, that did this. You’d create a profile, probably using DATA statements. The program would “spin” that to create the object. The rendering took a while, but it made some nice wireframes.