That specialist interfaces make you productive?
Sketchpad was just a cad tool, one of the first ones to be sure, but still a design tool.
We have substantially better ones today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIa4LpqI2EI
So in 62 years have we improved the state of the art in design by as much as between 1900 to 1962?
Yes. I'd say we have and more.
In that question, he's considered not with implementation or how good the execution of an idea is (which is certainly one type of progress), but in genuinely new ideas.
I don't think I personally am qualified to say yes or no. There are new data structures since then for example, but those tend to be improvements over existing ideas rather than "fundamental new ideas" which I understand him (perhaps wrongly) to be asking for.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i...
programs like houdini are more reactive and mathematical (no need to create width/volume by hand and trim intersections by hand), i think mech engineering tools (memory fail here) have options like this
In freecard there are parametric tools which are very much like what was shown in the demo but in 3d.
I tend to use script which render to openscad for the parts that I want to be parametric.