I haven’t use other 3d software than Blender so I have no point of comparison. I love it, every time I learn something, it’s always clear and logical.
Gui is very nice also, just 2 things against:
After one year of using, it always take me a while to join 2 windows areas. Now I gave up with this feature.
The lack of shortcut for switching between screenset layouts Developers should take a look at Reaper software from Cockos (It’s a Digital Audio Workstation and you can quickly save and load screensets layout with shorcuts! Awesome!).
Surprisingly capable compared to commercial alternatives.
Good for animation and rendering.
Excellent community.
Covers all three major OS.
Cons
Nightmare to initially understand and use without guidance from video tutorials and the community.
Whilst sculpting is surprisingly easy, low poly modelling is very awkward. Blender just needs to be a bit easier to get from A-to-B.
Improved documentation would help greatly in overcoming the initial “20 minutes trial” session that prevent many from giving Blender a fair chance.
Blender does need a “killer feature” for it to become more widely used. Two ideas would be more focus on game model creation(as its said that Blender makes more sense than Maya LT) or rendering, as Blender seems to be used by quite a few artists together with ZBrush.
Conclusion
Personally, I am happy with Blender and not really bothered with the future so long as the Foundation stays on its current course. If I had to project where Blender is and where it could go, though, I’d say its almost on level with Lightwave and Modo. keeping the pace its been going so far, I see Blender proudly taking its place alongside them. At the very least I definitely see it as an option for game content creation.
Things I dislike,
Blender users when you ask them a question they do not know the answer to. if you ask a question they do not know the answer to. They are likely to tell you it is a stupid idea and you should not waste your time with it.
If you don’t know people than just say so, If you are not motivated enough to do it, than say so. No need to be defensive about it. It is not a mark of shame. Just say so. I don’t need a 2 hour trolling on the topic. I do not need you to use the logical fallacy list as a heuristic checklist. I do not need extreme examples cited. If i’m asking about how hot the stove is. You do not need to tell me that exposure to the sun directly will split my atoms apart. (a semi absurd and sadly a semi close parallel to my experiences with this so far) That does nothing hinder progress. Both for the current task at hand, And for anyone else who may wish to ask a question.
Is 60fps necessary for an animation? I personally wouldn’t go past 30fps, as I would be adding some subtle motion blur as well. Though I think its a time vs framerate trade off.
I really really dislike the outliner.
For example, grouping several objects, selecting with shift, deleting objects. Why can’t I select the object on
top, then the object on the bottom with shift+click and it would select everything in between. Why can’t I select an
object and press delete to remove it…Etc…It’s painstaking.
On this at least, the new painting tools that came in for 2.72 has a line mode (selectable in the brush mode menu).
Then you just click on the mesh and drag to wherever.
On the undo/redo, I agree with you that Blender could have a good quality undo manager developed for it, however, I’m not sure if it’s much of a priority unfortunately. Global Undo/Redo at least is basically a hack that stores temporary copies of the .blend file (which is a major reason why it uses so much memory), this was developed for version 2.35 and has barely been touched since then.