This. Blender has some rather embarrassing performance choke-points even doing relatively simple things in some cases, that software like Maya and Houdini don'

This. Blender has some rather embarrassing performance choke-points even doing relatively simple things in some cases, that software like Maya and Houdini don't have to the same degree. GPL code (even if you're not distributing anything) is more of a problem than people would think, especially for places working on very strongly defended IP content (Marvel), where the content owners need to have guarantees that the software used is fully-licensed (there have been quite a few incidents in the industry where unlicensed commercial software was used, which causes surprising issues, like films being delayed), and similarly they need to know the software licenses for non-commercial software used doesn't have "surprises" in (some software has weird additions to licenses, like "must provide credits", and even the artists / developers working on the show for the studio don't necessarily get that). Extensibility is really the key thing: you wouldn't believe how much custom code is written for glue wrapping around stuff for integration - still mostly Python2, although 3's on the way for the industry, but the fact Blender only supported Python3 when the industry as a whole was still happy with Python2 (they don't really care about unicode, they would have loved the GIL to be removed though) meant it was a non-starter. Similarly, custom plugins (in C++ for performance) are required in huge numbers for various different things, modifiers, deformers, proxy drawing code, etc, etc, and Blender doesn't expose anything like that. Again, support: Autodesk are far from perfect, but they will fix critical bugs for key customers when they insist - i.e. there aren't work-arounds (often within a week).