Blender is pretty much the only program I use of the 100s I have that doesn't follow this UI pattern so I can't take all the knowledge of the other 100s of apps I use and apply that knowledge to blender. Even limiting to just 3D programs I can figure out Maya, 3DSMax, Cinema 3D, DAZ etc just by doing what I do in all other software. Select stuff and then see what my options are. Blender though doesn't follow these rules. You can't just explore. You absolutely have to read the manual to even just load, select, move, and save. Something I can do in all other software without a manual.
Which is exactly the complaint :D
Blender has a very efficient UI that is great for power users, but it has a much bigger learning curve than the competition with their point&click UIs. Add to that that most people are trained on Maya/3ds Max/Cinema 4d, learning Blender is a big investment with uncertain payoff.
Basically the same reason why very few people use Emacs or Vim nowadays.
Wow, this is such a bold statement; do you have any evidence to support this? In my experience a very great majority of engineers use vim or emacs. In US, I've never been in a culture where emacs or vim is used by a minority. In my current work, which is a startup in Boston, everyone except 2 developers use emacs. I googled for evidence to support me, but I couldn't find any solid evidence neither supporting nor disputing me.
The best evidence I could find is the Stackoverflow Survey [1]. Around the middle it asks for the "most popular development environments" (multiple selection possible). The leaders are Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio and Notepad++ with 34% each, followed by Sublime. Vim is fifth place, Emacs 15th place with just 4.1%. But it's heavily dependent on the community you look at, for example Vim is less popular with mobile developers and very popular with sysadmins/devops.
There is also a "prefered code editor" in the golang survey. Vim is second most popular, yet Vim and Emacs make for only a combined 16%.
According to the Rust survey [3] the rust community seems to love Vim though. 46% use Vim and 15.4% use Emacs.
A Python survey [4](by Jetbrains) has Vim at 10% and Emacs at 3%.
So from a quick look Emacs seems to be used by 2-4% of developers on a regular basis, while Vim use varies heavily between communities. So I might have to retract my statement on Vim, but I feel reasonably confident to say that Emacs is used by a tiny minority of people.
1: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/
2: https://blog.golang.org/survey2017-results
3: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/09/05/Rust-2017-Survey-Resul...
4: https://www.jetbrains.com/research/python-developers-survey-...
There are more Vim and Emacs users now than ever before, because there are now more computer programmers than ever before. There are just a lot more people that use other editors/IDEs. Just like there were more Visual Basic users than Emacs/Vim users in the 1990s. The Visual Basic/IDE people are irrelevant as far as Emacs/Vim/Unix/Free Software is concerned because they are unaware of what Free Software actually is (they do have a lot of misconceptions, ones that they really like to flame about on Internet forums), do not understand why they should ever contribute to Free Software, and even if they wanted to do so, they do not have the skills to contribute to Unix/Free Software. Just like all the Visual Basic chair warmers disappeared leaving behind their shitty cobbled-together software, so too will the current generation of people that do not have the capacity or interest to figure out Vim/Emacs/Unix, to be replaced by the next wave of popular garbage software. In another twenty years, more people than ever will still be using Vim/Emacs.
GIMP, however... makes me (every so slightly) annoyed every time I use it. I have to google so many task that should just be intuitive.
It does the job, and I still use it as my primary editor - but it's not something I look forward to opening... but it could be! I'm hoping it'll get there eventually!
But maybe that's because I started out on Blender and only had a cursory look at Maya. Same with GIMP. I have years of experience working with GIMP so if you sat me in front of photoshop I'd probably be a lot less productive with it. Maybe when people say "improve the UI" they just mean "Make it more like the program I'm already used to".