Adam,
You are right on a couple of accounts here, you will find alot of useful knowledge in this forum. Cad file programming has pretty much become the industry standard on complex parts, mostly sheet metal. It`s a snap compared to code writing! Your parts may be more prismatic & therefore simpler (in theory)to program with using hard code. Some (very few)customers are still supplying prints with dimensions only, but moving towards better tolerance control (GD&T)usually means analyzing more of the surface ect. Zeiss has cad based programming software, as does all the OEM`s you see here.
Silma is a total offline package that may interest you or visit all the sites of the OEM`s. They can usually retrofit their software on practically any machine.
jnlj@home.com