Having 'somewhere to go' when transfer fails is the new appeal. Irritatingly, but not surprisingly, downstream geometry requirements differ from design requirements. So geometry has to be transformed. Some CAD systems can suppress details and some meshing systems can ignore design details on the fly, but problems of emergent features and persistent parentage reduce benefits. What is really needed is automatic associative defeaturing.
Promise here lies in the generic geometry reasoning tool of medial axis computation.
Then with acres of innovative, geometry-based FEA modelling functions, access can still block the benefit. What is needed is a pyramid of software to connect the daunting breadth of possibilities to the narrow vocabulary of any one application. The author will reflect on 37 years of engaging problems in FEA, meshing and geometry exchange and hint at some possibilities.