Shawn and Kent, Thank you for your perspectives as well.
I have no doubts any complex software suffers from this issue to some degree. However, that degree still can be very different between different products. Having worked with many complex (sometimes unnecessary) products before (not 3d related), I’ve almost always found commercial software to be more predictable when it comes to the changes, and the changes themselves are usually better documented. That doesn’t make Blender bad or not serious or whatever. On the contrary, it is excellent and astonishingly successful software, and we all are lucky it exists. However, the open source development model has peculiarities that impact the end result. Again, it’s not bad, it’s just what it is.
Completely agree with the points about the community and CGCookie specifically.
I actually haven’t touched Maya for more than ten years since my student days, so it would be an interesting experiment. I don’t expect it to be a silver bullet or holy grail, I just hope that it has less of what annoys me at this stage.
