Hi Adam,
the old saying "ask 5 different cabinetmakers haw to do something and you'll get 5 different answers" certainly seems applicable here. I'm an american furnituremaker who has settled in the UK. Here we have so many trained furnituremakers from Europe from very disciplined backgrounds which I personally have found very humbling. Over here, many shops have or are migrating to SolidWorks (or Inventor) because of it's versatility from furniture to stairs.
I started using it in 2001 for complex geometries (mostly elliptical and curved stairs), but as time has passed I've also found it to be very good at simpler work as well, but this requires developing a library of basic parametric components which I then customise as I need to suit the final design (I've attached a link below to a simplified example of a parts template which I generated in a morning for a stone stair fabricator).
I have stair, door, cabinet and cabinet components set up as templates which I drop into a project. I also have libraries of smart hardware components, so when I fix them to the parts, they perform the drilling/mortises as needed.
This was essentially done to mimic an off-the-shelf SolidWorks based product called SWOOD which impressed me but I couldn't afford. It might be worth a look however.
In the end, I have an assembly of parts which matches the actual project, which means data for every aspect which I require and to optimise the parts list, after that I output separate optimiser.
The time required to output a project is about 25% longer than 2D AutoCAD, BUT the data is very useful and the parts list is an excellent verification tool before proceeding to the next step. Another thing worth considering, if you use Woodwop, there is a very good link to SolidWorks called OngaaCam. It isn't really CAM, but it's a bi-directional (yes, really bi-directional), so you can edit the parts in WoodWop and it writes back to the SolidWorks model or vice-versa. I haven't used it (yet), but had it demonstrated for a few hours on my own projects and it was quite impressive.
That's about all I can impart, but good luck with your search.
Regards,
Rufus