>The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment. Again, an emphatic, "No." Blender's massive improvements in the early-to-mid 2

>The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment. Again, an emphatic, "No." Blender's massive improvements in the early-to-mid 2010s are what brought investment from outside sources, not the other way around. It was an artifact around which interested parties could rally; that says nothing of its value as an executable piece of software, but rather its value as a focus to fulfill a need, which could be freely used to fulfill it. Its commercial codebase was not valuable to anyone but the people who meant to work on it as an open-source project, and only because it could be picked-through, modified, even most of it scrapped if desired. This can be - and has been - done with software that descended from non-commercial codebases, because the motivation to create a polished product does not necessarily lie in a profit motive, and it definitely is not a product of some esoteric design homeopathy wherein that profit motive lies buried somewhere in Blender's code. I think it's an insult to the hard work of the people who've produced the modern version of Blender that you insist on attributing the decisions they've made and implemented to some dedication to maintaining standards that did not exist for the product before they arrived. What I will concede is that everything that has happened was necessary for Blender to be precisely what it is precisely at this moment, for better or worse. Including it's commercial history. I don't like that this conversation is becoming so contentious and I would suggest you think about what like concessions you can make to your counterargument before becoming married to a wholly antagonistic stance.