I will agree that the timeline is chronological and it works. I don't think it works as well as it could.
If I have a component active, I think making a change to that component would be more intuitive if it was made to the end of the current timeline for that component. Instead it goes at the end of the timeline which results in a timeline with features all over the place and not grouped by component, just because I didn't think to do that particular step when I originally created the component.
The solution is to roll the timeline back to the last feature in the component and then activate the component and then the feature goes where I want it to. This is very time consuming with a long timeline, especially if the features for the component are not contiguous. (I did just think to look for an easier way while writing this and found that the context menu for the component in the browser will show the component in the timeline.
When I do find the component in the timeline, it would be helpful if the context menu for features of a component had a choice to activate the component. This is usually necessary because I likely had the main component of the design selected to allow navigating the entire timeline.
Most of my problems stem from my long career in software development. We constantly refactor code to group the things that belong together, make the structure more correct and understandable, make software components more independent. This carries over to CAD design for me. I never get it right the first time. Parameters and being able to go back and edit features makes Fusion 360 so good, but when trying to rearrange structure and manage dependencies it gets very hard.
Rules for Timeline Changes
I am still trying to learn all the rules. At one point I had read that the marker must be at the end of the timeline to move a feature. I now know this is not true because I just moved a feature with the timeline marker just after the feature.
It is obvious that you can't move a feature before a feature that it depends on, but there are times when I can't move a feature to the left, and it does not depend on anything but the very first sketch I made when I started the design. And, as far as I know there is know way to get Fusion 360 to tell me what is blocking the move.
I have also gotten into the case of cyclic dependencies and had no way to see those dependencies. I finally had to just delete a large chunk of my model to get back into a working state.
Because the timeline does not treat components as groupings, I cannot move an feature in the timeline into the sequence for a component and then make it part of that component. To move a body or sketch from one component to another I have to drag it in the browser. Sadly that adds the move body to the end of the timeline. Not what I want at all.
There is no rule that stops me from deleting a feature from the timeline that has other features depending on it. Fusion 360 knows about those dependencies. It even warns me that deletion will affect following features. If I delete the item then some features may have errors and others just get silently deleted. This has to be the worst timeline issue out of all of them. Fusion 360 knows there are dependencies, and it knows exactly what they are because it acts on that knowledge to change the design, but it won't tell me what they are. At a bare minimum, when the warning pops up telling me that deletion of a feature might cause downstream failures it could highlight all the features in the timeline that are going to be affected. I could use an more obvious highlight for features that are going to be removed.
Dependencies
Dependency management is a very complex and significant part of developing any kind of component based system. Without proper dependency management components cannot be shared, reused, improved in the most useful and efficient way possible.
Not making the dependencies visible and manageable by the user prevents the user from creating the best designs possible.
