It's also one of the most impressive technically, up there IMO with the likes of gcc and linux. The amount of non-trivial tech built into it is staggering, and

It's also one of the most impressive technically, up there IMO with the likes of gcc and linux. The amount of non-trivial tech built into it is staggering, and - most impressive, at least to me - the feature bloat has been really well managed, first from a usability perspective, but more importantly, from a performance perspective: blender remains, for many things, the fastest thing there is out there. If you want to convince yourself of that fact, try to load a rigged 1M poly scene stored in native blender format, and try to do the same thing with the Mayas and other 3DS maxes of this world.