Yeah, Cosmos is very "cartoon FEA". So easy, but limited. We used ABAQUS a lot, which was uber-powerful, but we only had the text input for model creation*. The subject turned into a ghost-chasing coding exercise and soon had nothing to do with FEA. For now, stick with Cosmos, and forget about making your life harder with "better" software :)
*ie, you can buy a graphical package like Solidworks or similar to generate models. We had to plot nodes in a text file :( |