At the same time I feel like the GPL license is a big limitation for Blender. There are a lot of niche tools in the industry and if blender was open source unde

At the same time I feel like the GPL license is a big limitation for Blender. There are a lot of niche tools in the industry and if blender was open source under MIT/Apache or something like that I'm sure you would see a lot of commercial plugins and spinnoffs. They would still have the incentive to contribute back to core to have their stuff merged with trunk and keep compatibility with latest but could also build commercial tools on too of the code base. Right now it's basically begging governments and donations for dev money and the level of polish is rarely at the level of commercial software.