And it is fascinating to see how it has evolved to become this. When it was first created as an in-house tool at NaN, the interface was just about the opposite. After a hundred hours of use, the 'one hand on keyboard, one on mouse' philosophy started to make sense, but the shortcuts and keys still seemed arbitrary; you just sorta memorized the whole interface. Heck, just discovering how to add a cube was sort of a personal coup for early-high school me since I had never used any real 3d modeling anything before.
But it was functional, and had some really great ideas, and it was free (which I needed on my nonexistent allowance)! I just assumed that the real cost was just a brutal learning curve. Then the really cool open source movement started for it when NaN went under, and people spent the next decade working to make it better.
It's always been a program for enthusiasts and passionate people, and it really shows. After half a decade I went back to it and was dismayed to realize I had no idea how to use it any more. And then 15 minutes later I was right at home. The learning curve's still there, but there are guideposts everywhere in the application, and the documentation exists! That you can throw Hy on top of it and live code it is just one more spiffy example of it working as intended. I would go so far to say that it's a core idea, since the blending engine made so many cool things easy (and possible) way back when it had an inscrutable interface.
Don't forget about the fantastic cuda/opencl cycles rendering engine. The progress Blender has made in terms of scriptable photorealistic rendering is just insane.
But it was functional, and had some really great ideas, and it was free (which I needed on my nonexistent allowance)! I just assumed that the real cost was just a brutal learning curve. Then the really cool open source movement started for it when NaN went under, and people spent the next decade working to make it better.
It's always been a program for enthusiasts and passionate people, and it really shows. After half a decade I went back to it and was dismayed to realize I had no idea how to use it any more. And then 15 minutes later I was right at home. The learning curve's still there, but there are guideposts everywhere in the application, and the documentation exists! That you can throw Hy on top of it and live code it is just one more spiffy example of it working as intended. I would go so far to say that it's a core idea, since the blending engine made so many cool things easy (and possible) way back when it had an inscrutable interface.
TL;DR: I agree wholeheartedly.