Punch! HLD Studio 21 4+

Not really worth the money

I have used Punch CAD software in the past and they have always been a mixed bag, with the bad part finally winning and making me abandon the application after many frustrating hours. Home & Landscape Design Studio is not different. I spent many hours trying to get a decent 3D view of how I wanted our front yard to look after renovation and finally had to give up. There are just some things that the program will not do. It is impossible to model retaining walls correctly if the level of the land is different on each side of the wall. I spent at least 10 hours looking on forums etc for a way to do this simple and essential thing and was unsuccessful.
The 3D rendering is also very dissapointing. I cannot acheive beautiful renderings like they show in the examples they must have worked very hard and picked the best examples of their renderings. The renderings of my landscape design are low resolution and cartoonish comapred with what is shown.
The 3D&2D navigation tools are also unintuitive and hard to use, although after much frustration I think that I finally figured out how to see most of my lot from useful angles.
Also buyer beware -- previously I purchased their ViaCad 2D/3D application. After about a year the first version that I bought refused to open on my Mac, so I spent another $100 to upgrade and that version stopped working in about 6 months. I only purchased the Landscape Design application a week ago, but I don't doubt that it will refuse to open in couple of months. Punch jas seemed to improve one thing though. The ViaCad software would crash or quit working correctly after about 45 minutes and I'd have to quit it and restart, sometimes losing some of the work I had done -- the Landscape software has only had to be restarted about 5 times in the 20 or so hours I've tried to use it so far.