I'm not professional or anything but I find 3ds max UI and way of doing things/UI/toolbars/working with geometry and keyboard shortcuts MUCH more intuitive than Blender. Everybody says Blender is awesome and I respect that, but seriously, no matter how hard I try I always end up saying "this is much easier in 3ds max". Any recommendations?

Probably to stick with 3D Max. I really like 3D Max a lot. It was my tool of choice for about 18 years but, as I stopped doing much 3D professionally, I just decided to give Blender a shot and, once I got over some of the weird UI, most of which is now fixed, I found that I liked it a lot.

How did you get into doing 3D Max professionally? Have you used any other packages like Maya, Lightwave, or Alias's offerings way back when?

I started using 3D as a lark. I am a long-time on-line editor and VFX compositor and had access to 3D in the various studios I worked when commercial 3D packages became a thing, starting in about 1983 or so. More importantly, I had access to some amazingly good animators, modelers and 3D engineers of whom I could ask questions and who I could watch work (and annoy). They had a lot of downtime to talk because of rendering time. Several of these people are, today, legends in the field.

In 1995 I started my own 3D animation, design and VFX studio. It was a Softimage house on SGI with a DEC Alpha render farm but I had a couple seats of 3D Max as well as Side-Effects Prisms and, later, Houdini.

I have used Cubicomp 3D, Bosch FGS-4000, Vertigo, Wavefront, Alias|Wavefront, Softimage, Prisms, Houdini, Maya and 3D Max packages as well as the Rhino 3D Nurbs modeler and several other long-gone packages including a 3D solids system whose name I cannot recall.

A 3D guru I am not, though. I regularly see stuff today that I just cannot imagine how in the hell was done and the insane skill levels involved in doing it. I will point out one thing that was common among the really good 3D practitioners: most of them are really good musicians in addition to being outstanding fine artists. The character animators generally had a drama background.

Now, I just mostly play around, doing the occasional explainer video/animation pieces and elements, usually having to do with automotive and aviation technologies. My old-ass brain can't keep up any more.

Have you tried it after 2.7? I'm not familiar with 3d modeling, but I heard a lot of people praising the UI changes for that release

Yes. 2.8 was the big UI change which made it a lot more familiar to folks used to the "mainstream" 3D suites/apps.

Yup, it was actually after 2.8 which changed UI a lot as I read (don't know how it was before 2.8)

Very much its own UI that didn't follow (the admittedly somewhat loose) established conventions. Right-clicking to select and other weird stuff. I got used to it but it really required a lot of playing around to begin to associate the user-model with my prior experience in 3D software-land.

I remember thinking at the time that, had I had no prior experience to build on, I probably would have given up on it.

There's a fork called Bforartists which recreates this workflow in Blender.

https://www.bforartists.de/