I took a second look at Blender, and I have to agree with you 100%. I'm astonished at how much python is incorporated into the “little things” like help-text and api. And the scripting! And the keyframe interface!

Many kudos are in order.

This is a generally well respected feature comparison chart: http://wiki.cgsociety.org/index.php/Comparison_of_3d_tools

Blender is generally feature rich, but has a fairly different UI than other products. People vary on whether or not they find that a good thing, Blender was originally built in an animation studio, for the most part, the interface prioritized ease of use for the knowledgeable user over ease of use for the new user whenever there was a conflict and sometimes neglected the latter altogether.

The project has since put in a lot of work to try and make the interface a bit easier to pick up without compromising on the speed with which current artists who use Blender heavily rely on. The 2.5 series of releases is the latest attempt at making this better.

Blender looks and feels different from any other UI I've ever seen. That said, I would hardly categorize Maya's UI as "easy-to-use." Fairly conventional, yes, but not particularly easy. 3D art is a difficult problem, so it rather makes sense that the UIs take time to learn. Blender just takes an unusual approach, and honestly — there's nothing wrong with that. For comparison, Emacs takes a different approach to text editing than Visual Studio.

Blender is a very capable "integrated" package; however everyone finds some faults with the individual tools. I have a lot of trouble with the modeler, personally, and resort to modelling in Wings3D and exporting the result to Blender. On the other hand, a lot of people praise the video editing and compositing tool as a competitive video editor in its own right.

I'm only a novice 3d modeler. But, my impression is that Blender has all the features that commercial vendors provide. The main reason it isn't popular is the interface is much different that 3D Max. I started using Blender having no past experience and have been quite pleased. The learning curve is kind of high and there is little good documentation on Blender 2.5.

This is the first stable release in the 2.5 line. Yes you could use the new UI before now with pre-releases, but that's been true for a long long time.

I am not sure if this means the python API is stable, too.

Quote:

    For the next 2.58 release the API will be completed
    with access to internal notifiers and events to track
    data changes or UI refreshes.