i Havn't used much Catia for drawing production. In my company we use a color code to mill all parts. We have reduced the lead time of a project used that code, and it works fine!
Regarding the other softwares, I used in the past Solidworks and NX, and a bt of solidEdge. SolidWorks and SolidEdge, for me are the simple ones to use. They are very oriented to user. If I open a business to my self, I would think in one of these two. Of course, the price of both compared to NX or CATIA, is really less. Now between CATIA and NX, if you are not the guy that wants to loose much time with macros, I would bet to use NX, from my experience is the most complete after a single instalation. CATIA is An awesome software, but more expensive of all (I think even NX), but it looks that dassaul doens't improve it much for years, only small things (For example, the sketch environment looks really very old, and you need to do a lot of clicks, compared to NX). But if you want to do some Macros, both can excel on that, but for macro developing, I really prefer CATIA.
