Hi guys,
Interesting discussion.
Marco: "I remember well all the strive and the work to produce super optimized source code both with Amiga and Commodore 64."
Yes! :) I was a designer of commercial 16-bit games for about 10 years, mainly for the Commodore Amiga, and before that I had a Commodore 128. I loved those early, pre-internet days of the digital revolution.
Back in those days you had to take over the whole system to really get the most out of a machine. I remember our team's coder had to develop his own disk loader, his own copy protection, his own graphic routines, we even had our own music editors to create music for our games. They were called SIDmon and The Digital Mugician. The Digital Mugician was sold to Thalamus software in those days. They released it.
More about our games can be found here:
http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?N_ref_artist=992
— Don't mind my angry photo. It was a selfie in a mirror taken before smartphones existed. :)
OSTexo: "Blender is the poster child for bad UX. It's almost as if they intentionally made UX decisions to make it unusable. Yes, it's that bad."
I largely disagree with this, sorry. I was a long-time 3ds Max user since the second half of the 1990s. But the very high pricing and slow development of 3ds Max made me look around for alternatives in the early 2010s. I decided to go for Blender because I also wanted to shift from Windows to Mac OS, and 3ds Max only works on Windows.
Initially, Blender takes some time to get used to, I won't deny that, but if you study the many free video tutorials that are around, and experiment with Blender's many tools and features, you'll discover that everything works very logical, and functions work very consistent throughout the different sections. Blender is very dependent on keyboard shortcuts, but that can really speed up your workflow. Once you know the most important keyboard shortcuts, you'll be able to use those shortcuts in other Blender sections as well. For example, in the 3D editor, Shift + A adds a new object, and in the Video Sequence Editor, Shift + A adds a movie clip or other content.
Last but not least, the upcoming Blender 2.8 will feature some interesting UX improvements, including visual gizmos to live-adjust properties on-screen.
