I too have been a Claris CAD user for many years, designing many many yachts from 8' through to 100' and Claris CAD was certainly a great program to use.
I switched to RealCADD about three years ago because my new mac's wouldn't run classic any more and I also wanted to transfer files to DXF format for CNC cutting of parts (I used to do this via Claris Translator).
Ok - so RealCADD has a few glitches and it is obviously slightly different from ClarisCAD. But one has to spend time learning any new program if one is to use it in depth and professionally.
I have found it to be an excellent replacement for ClarisCAD, possessing many excellent features that ClarisCAD did not possess – the most important of which for me is the ability to draw parallels from polyline curves.
And the developer is very amenable to adding new features if requested – a huge improvement over ClarisCAD, where one had to wait for a new version to come out (didn't often happen).
Maybe the earlier versions that got bad reviews were not so good as the present version – but the current version is excellent and I can work faster and much more accurately that was possible with ClarisCAD.
Overall a great program at a reasonable price.