SideFX is the single most pleasant and hope-restoring company to deal with in this entire field. Other vendors have amazing teams, but top to bottom SideFX outclasses them all in terms of support, feedback reception, release cycles, feature/stability improvements, and licensing.
I don't know if I have a point to make, I just wanted to gush about my favorite 3D software, and also I'm sad to see what autodesk is doing to Maya, what an absolute disaster. I loved Maya so much when I was a teenager. It was built by a brilliant company (Alias|Wavefront), it could've been so good if it wasn't sold to autodesk.