With LDD Being Discontinued I've elected to migrate to LDraw and would like some help

[Hamish Grace]

Personally I think LDCad is only slightly hideous If you want you could tweak the colors by editing the main.gui file, as the default colors try to mimic the LEGO building booklet colors.

You could limit yourself to using the physical color parts but it will increase part bin seeking unless you set up your own custom bins (In LDCad)

SR3DBuilder and LDCad have part snapping and bricksmith is working on it I believe. Non of these (far as I  know) use collision detection though.

In LDCad snapping is disabled by default and I choose not to implement collision detection on purpose, see also:

http://www.melkert.net/LDCad/faq#faq_ps2

Above is partially bias as I'm the author of LDCad.

Thank you for your reply 
How would I go about 'setting up my own custom bins', and what is part bin seeking?
Surely official part colours is a fairly important part of any LEGO CAD application..
I'm wanting to use a digital LEGO system so i can design builds and purchase the parts for them from bricklink, so official part colours is important.

I found the FAQ on your site and enabled part snapping, thanks for that.  But why no collision detection?