I have been super busy on other things and haven't been posting here, but AutoCAD MEP is kind of an involuntary trigger for me.
I have not actively used it on a project, but I have done some programming and tinkered around quite a bit. When CADmep was a large investment on top of AutoCAD, I was of the opinion that my skill set could quite easily turn AutoCAD MEP into an absolute joy to work with. It has the coolest block editor and a project manager that both need to be migrated into base AutoCAD in my opinion.
As the software landscape and the pricing structures have shifted, AutoCAD MEP is no longer something I would consider viable. It could be awesome, but not without a lot of development from you and Autodesk making a commitment to expose it better to the Revit collaborators. IE, there is no (good) way to get those objects represented in Revit except as a giant-single object reference.
If your choosing between those two the only thing that AutoCAD MEP has going for it is actual 3D solids instead of faces. As someone noted, it also has the ability to represent 3D parts as single line objects from a plan view, but that honestly isn't much interest to me since I like detail in my production drawings.
CADmep is poorly supported by Autodesk in the AutoCAD environment, that is its only true con... It also has insane amounts of functionality that work, but are loosely coupled together; which can be confusing. Everything else about it is kind of amazing.
- Creating your own content isn't all that difficult once you figure out exactly how connectors work
- Modeling is great but not parametric and honestly that is a good thing depending on what your doing; most parametric systems just get in my way by fighting me the whole time.
- Drawing production isn't bad out of the box, but some custom annotation tooling goes a long ways.
- Coordination is great and the object enabler exposes enough information to get good feedback from meetings
- Reporting is great from the sense that there are so many options, but the lack of consistency between them can be really frustrating at times.
- The MAJ format is seemingly version independent; which is not something I can say about most BIM formats.
- The list really can go on forever, its a great baseline and really doesn't deserve the red headed stepchild status it seems to have on the AutoCAD side.
I will also throw in that Plant3D is a better option than AutoCAD MEP. However, Plant3D doesn't have Revit integration and the last time I talked to anyone that mattered about that, I didn't like the response...
