I empathise but I've used Blender, 3dStudio, Lightwave, Maya, Houdini, and Z-Brush professionally and they all have complex interfaces that have pluses and minu

I empathise but I've used Blender, 3dStudio, Lightwave, Maya, Houdini, and Z-Brush professionally and they all have complex interfaces that have pluses and minuses. From a modelling point of view I am waaaaaay faster in Blender than I ever managed to be in Maya or 3DStudio, and I first used 3DStudio in probably 1996. Contrary to you I also love the ease of navigation in the Blender viewport compared to 3DStudio and Maya (and noughties Lightwave. Shudder). Numpad controls, split ui, frame object, edge, collection, verts etc. The one thing is that Blender is heavily keyboard oriented, either shortcut or search based and while you can do everything by clicking around like most people do in Maya or Max, this is definitely suboptimal. Also if you don't have a numpad and a mouse wheel you're screwed. Honestly though, if you're doing 3D professionally, use whatever your studio / industry uses. If you're starting out today Blender is great because it allows you to produce high quality professional work, has great add-ons that are often free or cheap compared to other packages and is free (as in beer). There are other aspects of the UI that are annoying mind. Horizontal node graphs are irritating, its only now getting an asset browser, there's a distinct lack of proper progress bars, and from an add-on developer point of view it's a pain in the arse to draw on the viewport, the core codebase is basically not documented and the API is stupidly unstable and is broken All. The. Time. The UI / UX has improved for new users but I definitely agree they need to hire some UI / UX people and technical writers / tutorial makers to make the learning curve less cliff like.