Engineering and Product design are incredibly visual and collaborative processes that an industry standard CAD package provides the right tools for.
A designer my rough out a component and try it in an assembly, try to explore the ergonomics with human models or the design for manufacture and assembly by exploring it's space claim in respect to the rest of the assembly.
The aesthetics and GUI rendering are also extremely important for exploring where to go with engineering and aesthetic product designs.
Programming itself is incredibly creative, but programming as a CAD tool is, I feel, decidedly antithetic and sterile.