Yes, absolutely. Conformer searches with Open Babel and RDKit take a few seconds vs. minutes to hours with CREST.
Moreover, a collaborator showed that CREST (and ML methods trained on those geometries) don’t predict bioactive conformations well because they can’t account for interactions with the protein / environment. So diverse geometries from RDKit (or Open Babel) are better suited:
“Conformer Generation for Structure-Based Drug Design: How Many and How Good?”
doi: 10.1021/acs.jcim.3c01245
Which is a long way of saying “yes, the Open Babel search dialog is coming soon”
On the other hand, CREST scripts for protonation / microsolvation, etc. would be great.