It's Art and Engineering (A&E)
What we think are more important can be a can of worms. Look at Paul Sellers sketch work. It's accurate enough to build from, and more importantly, tweak for final design. A famous building was designed on a napkin; or some like to think so. I am partial to the subject line.
I think building a CAD file of your (McGuire's) spoon box is pretty much overkill. The whole thing can be mocked up in cardboard to reveal and assess design, which is what you want in the first place. Once the requirements shrink to mechanical scale and you are using off-shelf items to build, the computer gets important. I design in computer because I have both the machine and software; and I don't have space for my table and drafting tools. I gave away all my drafting film and paper.
Besides, a cad file is only as good as the hardware that can read and plot it.... Or, show it on a monitor screen.
There were several drafting softwares in the 80's before AutoCad acquired the premier title. I adopted CAD a few years (shortly) after pc's and the GUI became popular in A and E offices. Engineers--my contact was civil---were using plot-printing design well before AutoCad and the space shuttle design file showed up. Points were plotted to a sheet of paper, I think 22" width, and the draftsman/person connected the points and drafted in the features by hand.
Up until the mid-nineties I could design-draft my work by hand faster than via computer; the engineers could plot reproducible hardcopies, where mine were still one-off originals. My one-offs went out the door pretty often with the CAD plots. That's how I knew my capabilities.
Pretty quickly, blueprints to be made from plotted tracings turned into the computer sending to a $100-grand plotter that printed the entire document in a few minutes.
A couple years before I retired everyone wanted me to hand render projects for their office walls. Computer illustration was just too boring.
