I use Unity's Blender integration extensively. It just invokes blender's CLI to convert .blend -> .fbx for you automatically, which is nice.

However, only very simple material properties are imported. Multi-textured objects, materials with specific BSDF properties, etc. are basically ignored entirely and you have to manually reproduce them in Unity after the fact. It's very annoying.

Perhaps with this news this is soon a thing of the past

It would be a good start if the Principled shader could be imported with some degree of fidelity. A lot can be done with just that one..

Can't happen without parity, or at least mapping between Unity and blender rendering engine.

Materials is complicated enough that they should probably not attempt to port. Unity ships with real time rendering features that blender doesn't have, so anyhow stuff will be fine in unity itself. It leaves blender plenty useful for mesh modeling, uv mapping, rigging and animation.

I'm not sure about that (unless something recently changed) - however it does have great support for the FBX format, which Blender imports and exports with absolutely zero issue for me, animations included.

An invaluable resource is Adobe's somehow free humanoid 3D animation suite, Mixamo. You can easily create your own T-Bone model of a 3D character of your own design and then import it to Mixamo for the coolest results.

Unity is probably the coolest and most irreplaceable/invaluable piece of software I use next to Apple's Logic Pro X. I love it.

Unity does support .blend files and has done so for the better part of a decade - however, it is implemented by the Unity editor invoking Blender to transparently convert the model from .blend to FBX. Here's a related page from the Unity documentation from 2013: https://docs.unity3d.com/410/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-Impo...

You can use Blender files in Unity directly without first exporting them as obj or fbx, but there may be some caveats. Like I'm pretty sure you still had to manually hook up textures and stuff last time I tried.

I think you get that with FBX but it's not a big deal since most time you create your own materials.

Yeah, true