Does anybody have any experience with the FEA module in FreeCad?

The FEA module is quite usable in its current state. You should be able to do the tasks you mentioned. Follow the wiki and tutorials first to get the hang of it because there may be some differences between FreeCAD and whatever commercial FEA suite you learned in engineering school...Those differences can confuse you if you're not aware. What one might think is a bug could just be due to incorrect procedure; wrongly assuming that everything works the same way as solidworks or another software. If freecad itself doesn't have every option or functionality you're looking for, it's good to remember that FreeCAD's FEA module is just an interface to other free tools such as Calculix and Elmer, so you can always use those directly. The FreeCAD GUI doesn't expose every single functionality of the various backends which it plugs into. A final note is that FreeCAD is always under development and some releases or certain packaged versions may have bugs. I prefer the Appimage releases because i can just launch whichever version works best for me. For instance there were certain things that worked better for me in 0.17 than 0.18 and vice versa. That's the beauty of free software. No restrictions or licenses to worry about.