That is such a lame, played-out excuse. A real favorite of apologists for shitty UI design.

You are absolutely right. It doesn't hold water once you look at other professional programs. They all use the same math underneath and love or die to a huge degree based on their interface. Blender being free and open source opens up possibilities for people with no access to professional tools and researchers, but compared to the commercial tools out there its interface is a mess of inconsistency.

It's really not. Take a tool like after effects. The interface is not obvious, the icons are unlabeled (until you mouseover and get a tooltip). You've got to learn it as you would learn to use any other tool.