I know that 3D graphics aren't trivial to learn, but the tragedy with Blender is that it is arbitrarily difficult. The difficulties aren't intrinsic to learning

I know that 3D graphics aren't trivial to learn, but the tragedy with Blender is that it is arbitrarily difficult. The difficulties aren't intrinsic to learning 3D. A lot of people -- both beginners and professionals from other platforms -- are turned off Blender when they can't even figure out how to do basic functions like select an object or pan across a view without watching tutorial videos. That's really unreasonable, and I'm sure that Blender loses a substantial portion of its potential users due to completely unnecessary UI anti-conventions like this. It wouldn't be difficult to fix: simply enabling "Select With: Left", "Orbit Style: Table", "Zoom to Mouse Position", and a handful of other existing defaults would make Blender vastly more approachable out-of-the-box. I'm sure that something as simple as this would produce a measurable increase in its rate of adoption, perhaps on the order of 15% or 20%, without compromising the advanced functionality in the slightest. Other measures such as consistent tooltips across the UI and contextual right-click menus would give another significant boost in adoption. The tragedy of Blender is that the community is highly responsive to feature requests from established users, and has developed some superlative advanced capabilities as a result -- but is blind to the needs of beginning users. If Blender were a commercial product (maintained by people who think not only in terms of features, but in terms of market penetration) then these kind of simple issues would have been addressed a decade ago, and the good efforts of the Blender developers would now be reaching a much much wider audience.