Just curious, have you tried using blender at a more or less advanced level? It's like comparing Windows and a Unix system and saying that Unix doesn't have a decent user interface. I mean, once you start using blender extensively, you realize that blender makes your workflow faster than the mainstream CG packages.

Of the big CG packages, I've used both 3DS Max, Maya, and Blender--Max most of all.

The gold standard for UI for me, though, is still Wings3D (based on Nendo). It has way better UV unwrapping support than anything else I've tried. It is as good as it is specifically because the functionality it aims at is quite limited.

Sketchup gets an honorable mention for UI, but the scripting and geometry it makes is such garbage I can't recommend it.

Blender's a bit like a tiling window manager. If you don't get on with your keyboard you're not going to have much to say. It is however extremely efficient for those that do.

What it's missing really is some of the universal, underlying data flow architecture that the likes of Maya and Houdini had from the start. But it's getting there.

> some of the universal, underlying data flow architecture that the likes of Maya and Houdini had from the start

Could you elaborate on that? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "data flow" in the context of a CGI package.

Maya has its dependency graph architecture, while Houdini has its many layers of networks. They both make explicit their pipelines of data transformation, using a common building block, and that allows the system and the artist to reason about what gets done and when. You might create some geometry (a grid), then apply some noise to it to create a landscape, then use it as part of a physics simulation as a static object, then also use it as part of the rendering of the final image. You expect to be able to change the parameters of each of those stages and reason about the result.

You'll generally see these pipelines depicted as editable, directed graphs (DAGs) in the application. Blender uses DAGs for a number of things - eg an image compositor, and for shading networks. It also provides modifier layers (like 3DS MAX) for geometry transformation. But it doesn't go down to the core of the application which is why you can get some problems when it comes to certain tasks in animation for instance. But they are working on this.

It's a bit like all these various architectures for the web - Flux, RxJS etc. They're making explicit the transformations and dependencies that happen, by means of a data flow graph (even if it is not visualised). This usually means less surprises and more opportunity for optimization.

They're working on it, though: http://code.blender.org/index.php/2015/02/blender-dependency...

Oh yes, I see now. Actually, that was one of the few things I missed in Blender coming from Softimage. Not too much, though, but I do appreciate the power of a unified editable operation stack/pipeline for bigger projects.