I used Solidworks a bit and I would definitely says it has this first stage UI. After maybe 1h of tutorials you are already designing your first parts that you can 3D print.
Yeah, well that steep learning curve everyone is complaining about for blender is about an hour. After that, you'll probably be doing rigged animation.
In my opinion, people associate cost with value. Something that's free MUST be worse than something that costs thousands of dollars.
As Microsoft demonstrated - if something is equal in power and free- the cost drops dramatically. Cant see that happen with Adobe CS or Autodesk 3dsMax.
And its not a hour, even if you know other solutions. I guess in this sort of discussion, that is considered a defeat of the "opponent" - winning by him/her admitting in anecdata that he/she is stupid enough to take this or that longer to learn. Unfortunately feeling smart , doesn't help the cause of open source one iota.
I always wondered, why some people get full zealot for open source? Does explaining the problems away, instead of building a user-friendly OS/ 3D editing Software, supplies some sort of elitist "invites only Treehouse" kick?
I consider Blender much more user-friendly than Max, Softimage, Modo and ZBrush (to list the ones I've used). With Blender I found that I got frustrated a lot less because the work flows for the most tasks I did were streamlined and efficient.
Consider what you're learning. If you've never ever done 3D modelling, it will take much more time to learn just because you need to first learn the principles of doing 3D modelling. My SO is doing exactly that in 3DS now, and I can clearly see it takes her much more time to figure out what to do than how to do it in the program itself.
That said, a lesson often forgotten (or perhaps never acquired in the first place) is that learning requires some minimum structure, discipline and focus. To give you an example - I've been shying away from learning Paredit for about two or three years of my Lisp coding experience. Then one day I decided, "fuck it", I'm taking time to focus on learning it. It only took two pomodoros - literally less than an hour, and yes, I timed it - of reviewing the documentation and practicing (I took a big function, stripped the structure out with M-x replace-str to remove all parens, and then restored the structure using only Paredit operations) to become pretty proficient in the mode, and now I'm that much faster in working on Lisp code.
I've repeated this experience several times in various places - it's surprising just how much you can learn in an hour if you actually focus on it. Sometimes you have to invent your own exercises, but then again, maybe you have to learn how to learn first :). And yes, I do explicitly schedule time for "learning how to learn" in areas I'm not very familiar with, in order to make the actual learning more efficient :).
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As for getting full zealot for open source - I do agree it's an existing phenomenon. But at least in my arguments for Blender and Emacs, be sure it's not open source zealotry. I'll argue just as strong for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and against OpenOffice. The latter just sucks, in a death-from-thousand-papercuts way. So does Linux as a desktop for non-tech people. Open Source seems to be a negative predictor for quality for tools that are a) above some level of complexity, and b) not for developers.
Still, my primary argument is - a powerful tool will necessarily have a learning curve; the longer and steeper the more powerful a tool is. You can try and make this curve easier to traverse, but ultimately you can't flatten it in any other way than by making the tool less powerful and less useful.
You should give it a shot. I was rounding up, actually. There are YouTube tutorials that go from zero to animation in under 20 mins. That includes rigging.
Like it or not, i fight for the users! Better to bitch about things that could change- then instead of bitching about ignorant users not adapting to once comandline User Interface for Ecell . Because you wont train everyone into a coder.
Your failures don't make other people zealots, though. People who like Blender, who learned it quickly are not trying to harm you. They're just thrilled something so wonderful exists.
You know whats hard? Introspection. Hearing that your tool suck, and admitting they are right. The game i dev on sucks at the moment. And, if you said that, with specific advice on how to improve- you would get a thank you.
I contribute to open source- and thus i claim the right to criticize something that is botched. Deal with it. Trying all the angles, are we? If you are a beginner, you do not have enough experience to criticize the subject. If you are a expert, you are too dumb.
If you are a coder and are fluent with the likes of emacs and vim - and dislike the gui, you are a evil cooperate guy.
If you persist after that, you are bitching, as in arguing to argue.
Such a thing as critical love, wanting to see something flourish - is not possible.
The blindness of the likes of you - allows a whole industry of UX-Designers to exist. There i said it.
People must get paid to work with the UX that get crafted by some programers into those "professional" tools.
Solidworks frustrates me because, as you describe, it is very easy to jump into and get moving, but once you start needing more advanced modelling or more intense surfacing, solidworks becomes an unwieldy beast of secret features and unintuitive workflows. There are many pros who scoff at this and just power through (like all things, solidworks is just a skill after all), but as a lower end user sometimes I just through my hands up and use a more intuitive modeller like rhino at the expense of solidworks powerful features such as the feature tree.
The 20 grand per seat price tag doesn't help much either
I have never seen actual professional software that included this first stage.