Interestingly, I'm not aware of any really good laminate modelling software. The usual laminated plate elements in general FE codes work ok, but accurately modelling a curved flange, for instance, needs a LOT of elements. Also, getting good through-thickness forces is a real problem. Laminated plate elements will generally recover interlaminar shears, but more sophistication is usually beyond them, by their very nature.
We could do with some good support for creating and post-processing laminates made from solid elements. You can, of course, model this explicitly, but it's a LOT of work, both creating the model and post-processing it.
Using a general FE code is arguably over-kill for many problems, which are more complicated than a CLT plate analysis allows for, but do not necessitate the analysis of an entire structure. Also, repeatedly modding an FE model when sizing is not an efficient way to do things. At the moment we tend to analyse such problems with an ad-hoc set of Mathcad sheets and spreadsheets (with VB macros) created individually for each problem. This is hardly ideal, but does give us the needed flexibility. There is a reasonable suite of such halfway house software in ESDU, but it doesn't tie together very well.
Perhaps there's someone out there who's working on a nice little program which will do edge effects, through-thickness tension and shear around curved laminates, stress concentrations at holes, ply-drops and transitions to honeycomb from monolithic laminates, with some stability calcs...maybe it already exists. Any takers?
In the mean time, small FE models with lots of detail, running several ESDU programs, or writing in-house spreadsheets, etc., seem to be the main options. Of these, ESDU and most FE require serious money (though increasingly reliable FE on the cheap is becoming available), and writing your own stuff takes time (=money) to set up.
PS: Spirit, in what way were you finding the 2D CLT inadequate? Just curious.
