Or, indeed, years. I've been semi-seriously using it since 0.19 and one of the most frustrating things about it is how poor the affordances are. Going from idea to execution is often completely unpredictable in terms of what intermediate stages you need to go through, especially for things like the Curves workbench where you need to convert between different types of "line in space" representation for, as far as I can tell, no particularly user-relevant reason.
While I'm ranting, the "workbench" abstraction might be very convenient technically, but it's implemented very arbitrarily. What conceptual set contains "Architecture", "Image", "Part", and "Robot"? And what's the conceptual dividing line between "Part" and "Part Design"? I understand the technical difference (in that "Part Design" should really be called "Body" because that's what it's for) but from a user's point of view learning which operations live where, and why there are (for instance) two different ways to do fillets with completely different user interfaces, just exposes them to technical implementation details they shouldn't have to care about.
You often see the justification on the forums that "complex tools are always going to have complex interfaces" - no, that's a failure of UI design. Start by acknowledging that, and things can start to improve.
totally agree. i feel the same way about blender and ardour, and i wonder if the ui layer is the biggest difference between open source and paid software of this type. ths reason being the ui is the first thing you notice so it probably influences sales the most
Blender I have less of an issue with, mainly because they've demonstrated that they're not afraid to do fairly major UI upheavals to improve things. It's a lot better than it was pre-2.8.
While I'm ranting, the "workbench" abstraction might be very convenient technically, but it's implemented very arbitrarily. What conceptual set contains "Architecture", "Image", "Part", and "Robot"? And what's the conceptual dividing line between "Part" and "Part Design"? I understand the technical difference (in that "Part Design" should really be called "Body" because that's what it's for) but from a user's point of view learning which operations live where, and why there are (for instance) two different ways to do fillets with completely different user interfaces, just exposes them to technical implementation details they shouldn't have to care about.
You often see the justification on the forums that "complex tools are always going to have complex interfaces" - no, that's a failure of UI design. Start by acknowledging that, and things can start to improve.