To be fair, Blender is better than 99% of the projects I've ever seen, commercial or not. AND they are open source, AND they have a great community behind, AND

To be fair, Blender is better than 99% of the projects I've ever seen, commercial or not. AND they are open source, AND they have a great community behind, AND they are also great at promotional bits like this page itself, AND they are being backed by large companies. So IMHO it's one of the best executed desktop programs while also being in a massively difficult field, and they deserve the praise. In many places there are outliers like this; Stripe for Documentation, Wikipedia for encyclopedic knowledge, Google for search, etc. The two main criticisms that I've found is that first the interface is very confusing (but this has been improved constantly in the last 5-10 years!). As a personal opinion, I believe this video was a big inflection point (Blender seemed stubborn before the video, but this video at the very least softened the opinion of Blender): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk The second one is that it's not "industry standard", but as more and more people are using it for hobbies and indie projects, this will def change eventually, so I'm not too worried about that as well.