With no disrespect to the blender team they are doing a bunch of good high quality ui work. As a longtime casual blender user(since the late 90's version 1.7 o

With no disrespect to the blender team they are doing a bunch of good high quality ui work. As a longtime casual blender user(since the late 90's version 1.7 on irix) that was less a "complete ui change" than it was a "we released a press release saying we did a complete ui change" the biggest actual difference was to swap the mouse buttons. See, blenders ui was always good, it was designed as a professional tool, that is, designed to be used for many hours a day. it had a very quick and smooth operating interface flow. However it did have a reputation, deserved, as having a bit of a learning cliff. when your primary design paradigm can be best described as having a 101 button mouse. there is a bit of learning involved. but two things changed, one, blenders ui flow started being copied in other 3d programs and became more mainstream and acceptable. and two, the blender team kept working backwards, adding slower, but more discoverable paths to the tools. Now I am not a member of the dev team, actually not involved in the community in any way so I am probably wrong, but the way I see it, there was a sort of very sticky reputation blender had that it was "too hard", this was mentally blocking a lot of potential users, so the only solution was to loudly say "hey we redid the whole ui to make it a lot easier", coughs, adds dark mode. it is still just as "hard" as it always was, but because people think it is easier they will take the time to learn it.