Scotts,
I agree you can teach someone to draw basic lines shapes and do basic things in AutoCAD pretty quickly. But if this is all you plan on doing with it why even bother with LT? You can do basic drawings with quick CAD and it only costs about $75.00. It will read .dwg files and save to .dwg format.
Doing lines and basic drawing commands is only the tip of the ice burg of what this program is capable of. I have two text books. One is over 1200 pages, the other is over 1600. If you are going to truly use the program efficiently you have to now how to manipulate things. For instance: I was in our shop a couple of weeks ago. (A rare occurrence!) A friend of mine is a detailer there now just learning on LT. He had multiple elevations of large duct bank details, complete with attributes that he needed to mirror so you would be looking at the elevation from the other direction. Well, when you to this the attributes come out upside down and backwards. As you know there are special commands to edit attributes but doing one at a time is rather tedious. I showed him that if he reset the mirrtext system variable the attributes would maintain there proper orientation. That saved tons of time and is just one example of literally hundreds of situations that come up where knowing the right command can save your sanity. I guess what I am trying to say here is if all you are doing is simple line drawings and room layouts don’t even bother spending the $700.00 + for LT and defiantly don’t invest the [Linked Image] $3000.00+ for the full version. Other much cheaper software can accomplish the same task.
As for AutoCAD LT. I here all the time from my shop that it’s just like the full version without 3D. Wrong. LT, while being a very powerful very useful program does not have a lot of functionality that the full version has. A few examples: LT does not work with express tools. (Huge deal for me) It does not have the geometry calculator (Big deal for me) Refedit is not available. Not very user friendly block attribute editing and extraction tools. (Big deal) Use of multiple UCS’s not available. (Big deal) For a partial list of the differences go here. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/files/1862824_AutoCADLT2002_WP_ACADvsLT.pdf
LT is a great program, don’t get me wrong. But it is missing more the just 3D capability