I was using "noob" to mean "newbie". A person who is new.
I agree with you when you say Blender's UI is non-standard and difficult to learn. It's definitely not the best of UIs. But it does something Fragmotion, Wings3D, CharacterFX, AC3D, and even 3dsmax/maya fail to do: The bottleneck in blender is NOT the UI.
Quote: "within only 5 minutes of using the software for the very first time. I was editing and modelling complex models in Wings3D within about 5 minutes as well. In Blender this is literally made impossible, because you are forced to learn a user interface that seems to spit on any of the proven control scheme conventions used by 90% of all software."
Right, and after having learned the UI in blender (which honestly takes about 5 days) and practicing it for a bit, you will already be able to accomplish things faster in blender than you could ever do in Fragmotion.
It's all a question of whether you consider the investment of time worth it. If you're the kind of person who frequently does 3D work, then you are shooting yourself in the foot for not being on the right side of this curve, because you KNOW you're not as efficient as you can be in Fragmotion and you're wasting a lot of time as a consequence.
If on the other hand you only want to use blender to convert between formats every other weekend, or dabble a bit with 3D models infrequently, then of course I agree that the investment is not worth the effort and blender is not the right tool to learn.
Quote: "The UI did not see that much of an overhaul at all"
2.49 to 2.50 was a huge overhaul. They rewrote something like 50% of the codebase. The 2.49 interface is almost nothing like what blender is today and back then even I was cursing about how bad it was.
Quote: "For what it's worth, people have complained about the counter-intuitiveness of Blender's UI since freaking day "
The real truth here is that nearly everyone who complains about blender doesn't know how to use blender. Those who use blender daily rely on its non-standard UI to maximize workflow, and they appreciate this. There are a lot of Maya people who say blender does a lot of things better.
Quote: "it still is based around the whole 'right clicking' means selecting nonsense"
This debate is decades old, and from a poweruser's perspective, right-click is the correct choice. Think about it: It separates
selection from
interaction. In Maya and a lot of other 3D programs, you run into this problem where you're trying to select an object, but you can't because your left-click is interacting with the active object's manipulator. You don't have this problem in blender because right-click will never interact with anything, it's only function is to select objects.
Apart from a few non-standard "quirks" in blender (e.g. right click) -- which, might I add, all turn out to be more productive once you understand the reasoning behind them -- what exactly is wrong with the UI? Every function you can trigger with a keyboard shortcut is accessible through a dropdown menu.
Quote: "the real problem is the application it's total lack of intuitive controls or an adaptation of existing proven control schemes"
Can blender's UI be made "conventional" while preserving its ability to stay out of a poweruser's way? I am of the opinion that making a UI more conventional works against making it insanely fast to use. The reason is quite simple: The blender developers have meticulously chosen bindings that maximize workflow, each backed by excellent reasoning. Standard UIs on the other hand follow conventions
for the sake of being standard and NOT ALWAYS for the sake of being productive.
I would also disagree with saying that the more intuitive UIs we are familiar with are "proven control schemes", implying they are "proven to be superior". The only thing they prove to be is cohering generally with how all other UIs work, sometimes at the cost of being fast to use. Furthermore, there exist numerous discrepencies in other "standard" UIs. For instance, photoshop uses scroll to zoom and mmb to pan, gimp uses ctrl+scroll and shift+mmb to pan. The PCB layout software I use requires you to press ctrl+mmb to pan. Three standard programs, but 3 different ways to pan. You might throw your arms up at this and say those are minor differences and that I'll get used to it. I throw back to you the notion that you'll get used to using right-click in blender.