This isn’t what I was going to write for this issue. In fact, I completed something else; it was about design decisions and how their results appear as if by magic in CAE feature trees. But it seemed to me that I was getting too negative in these pieces. You’ll hardly be surprised to hear that I think we have a few things to be negative about where we’ve got to as an industry. But we’ve also got a whole lot more to be pleased about, and maybe it’s better to look at that stuff more than occasionally. So, let’s look back at a reason we’ve got to be pleased with ourselves as an industry, and what our long dark nights of the soul have actually achieved.

This article appeared in the January 2026 Issue of BENCHMARK.