I would say that the realtime viewport (eevee) is now best in class. The rest is heavily dependent on opinion, familiarity and preferred workflow.
Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts.
To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.
"Substantially better" is a fairly large claim.
To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.