While NetFabb makes it easy to rotate something in 90° increments, things get a little more complicated when you have odd shaped objects.  Here is an example.

Take a 20 side die like the one below.  How would you line up to "20" face with the bottom so it's perfectly flat, in NetFabb.  Not easy, you would either have to calculate the angle of each surface, then rotate it in those angle increments in both the x and y axis, or you would try for a free hand rotation hoping that you get it it close enough.

With Meshmixer I would simply scribble on the surface and it would align it automatically with the bottom plane.

UGH - i hate Meshmixer. cant for the life of me figure out how to move things in it (ie: re-orient correctly) It always wants to import something standing on an edge or at a weird angle..

I'ts easy to rotate an object to align it with a plane.  Here is how you do it:

On the left pane click Edit, and from the pop-up box select Align.

Then simply scribble of draw a small circle on the surface you want to align, and from the Axis drop box select the axis you want to align your surface to.  If you simply want to sit a surface to the "top/bottom" select the "Y" axis.  Click Accept to finish.

I agree that NetFabb is more straight forward, but once you figure out how Meshmixer thinks, you'll find that it does stuff NetFabb can't, but as you said, NetFabb does stuff MeshMixer can't also, that's why I would welcome a hybrid of the two.

Autodesk has so much free software, I don't see any reason to think this wouldn't be as well.  After they aquired/saved Tinkercad, they kept it free.  Maybe they are looking to roll netfabb's mesh repair ability into Meshmixer.

This. They even offer AutoDesk Inventor entirely for free without any intervention from my school, so long as I have a .edu address. This is different than companies like say, SolidWorks, where the university has to purchase licenses to allow students to use a limited feature set. I am highly confident AutoDesk won't make any greedy choices here.

I cant figure out how to rotate the view, either - just to look things over... there is nothing "intuitive" about it, except maybe the sculpting tools.

Netfabb is just so much easier to use for checking and repairing things.

Autodesk has so much free software, I don't see any reason to think this wouldn't be as well.  After they aquired/saved Tinkercad, they kept it free.  Maybe they are looking to roll netfabb's mesh repair ability into Meshmixer.

Now, that would be cool indeed. 

If I could have both of those programs rolled into one, with a unified UI, I could really live with that.

I went and checked this morning, the free basic download is still available

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150924- … nting.html