While it may be true (it surely is in my case), designing for mass production (or even bespoke, but assembly line based production) is not the only usecase for a pattern drafting program.
My usecase is drafting historical (in my case late victorian - early edwardian) clothing, where most of the community is made by either hobbists or one-person businesses who do everything from drafting to the actual clothing production themselves.
they work for the one usecase they are designed for, and that’s good. One could complain of a lack of Free Software alternatives, but that’s another matter.
For my usecase, as an example, a software that forced me to start from a modern block would be useless, while Valentina allows me to use period drafting methods and thus get the right shapes.
This is a niche, and one that is small (and in the case of businesses small scale) enough that it would never be served by conventional software houses, and I consider the existence of software such as Valentina that can cover such needs as a big advantage of Free Software.
It’s not there yet, and using the stable version in many cases I still have to do some pattern manipulation using pen and paper, but the direction is the right one to serve my needs pretty well.
From my point of view this is especially funny because if I have understood correctly the “outdated book” mentioned here is one that I would consider waaaay too modern for my needs.
In my experience with period clothing, using a drafting method from the past doesn’t change your chances to get a good fit (because some averages have changed, but people have always been made of many shapes), although of course it changes the general shape of the result (e.g. for the same person / measurements a method from the 1900s would give a pigeon breast shape that fits perfectly (above the right underwear), but would look quite out of place even in an outfit from the 1910s, not to speak of one of the 2010s.
Wouldn’t these guys have very different bust_arc_f and bust_arc_b measurements? (I think, the snippet of printout of the measurements svg I have nearby is the one I needed for female clothing)