For all people who complain about 2.8+ being complicated, play around in Houdini for a day… 
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I looked at Houdini here a couple years back. Noped right out pretty quick-like. I’ve since bought a copy of Substance Designer, and I’m now learning about geometry nodes in Blender.
It’s like no matter what I do, where I run, these damn crazy nodes keep wanting to get all up in my grill.
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I’m not sure what to make of the original comment and it reads like a troll post, to be honest. You are making no attempt at learning anything new. How do you expect to develop as an artist if you’re not interested in progressing by learning new software/techniques. The YouTube playlist by the Blender team called “Blender Fundamentals 2.8” is a great starting point and will provide an answer for most of problems you’re experiencing.
Give it a try and if you’re still not satisfied with the recent updates, the original Blender versions will always be available. It’s the beauty of open source.
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It made more sense in 2.7x and before, because the legacy material system (for BI) would always involve a single diffuse shader as the core of your material.
Now, you can have many diffuse shaders in a single material, and you can add other shaders that might have their own colors. How is Blender supposed to decide what color your object will be in solid mode? For the accurate display of materials, you need to be in the shaded view anyway (which uses Eevee, and it is far better than the GLSL textured view in 2.79 and before).
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I think this thread is missing a discussion on the merits of moving away from Right Click Select.
(just a joke - not serious)
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There’s a whole community of users who jumped from Modo to Blender (myself included) and ppl are still jumping from other apps precisely because of 2.8 and 2.9. Blender is slowly becoming a tool capable of doing a job in X amount of time, not a tech nerd tool where you take more pride in knowing how to do something in a roundabout way than actually doing it. Blender is still not there, but with addons it’s getting there… I really can’t wrap my head around this topic.
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This is what I’m trying to wrap my head around. Blender 2.49b’s binaries were last updated in 2009…which was 12 years ago.
https://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.49b/
I honestly can’t tell if this is an attempt at trolling or if OP hasn’t upgraded Blender in a decade. The 2.4x series was so crippled compared to industry standards of the day, both in UI design and functionality, that it’s hard to take it seriously.
Edit: I can’t math.
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To proverbially beat a dead horse, A poor worker blames their tools. This adage is obviously generalizing but it is especially true with blender. Its free and has a wide variety of users and a community ready to help via addons or free scripts and tutorials. Instead of having a mindset of “I want this to work my(old) way” A better mindset is “how can I make this work for me” . Thats how you get developers and addon creators. blender is for everyone in the same way that its not for everyone.
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I will never understand people that claim 2.4x is straight forward and easy to use. Anyone can launch it and see for themselves that is not true.
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I think it is important to hear others opinions. If you have a workflow that works well for you and is efficient then its hard to have to give it up. I understand that well enough. Just because a particular approach is superceded for another doesn’t necessarily make that original approach invalid or without merit. For perspective I’ve been using Blender seriously since the 2.6 Sintel and Tears of Steel days. So admittedly not as early as the original post makes reference to. I was a big fan of the old set up from then. But I saw the sense and reasoning in the 2.8 changes and adapted. It’s still Blender.
As for pipelines and file formats etc. I am finding , and seeing from others that Blender is far more adaptable with other apps and into larger studio production pipelines now after 2.8 than it has ever been. What is the point of rattling the cage and being somehow different simply for the sake of being different. Surely the priority for any creative tool like Blender is to get better and more efficient at what you do and to be more accessible ?
Having said that I think that Blender is inherently unique just in the way it has grown and developed and that goes right to the core of it and it will always be there. This is not how the interface is arranged or what button goes where between versions. Or even … cough … right click select. But it’s core character and approach to things. In that it’s much more than just a 3D app. It’s a whole mini media production platform all integrated. This is what I think makes Blender truly it’s own thing and quite special. So it’s incredibly advantageous and ideal for individual creators and small studio set ups just in just the way it works as an app and it’s philosophy and approach. Which I am especially seeing now working mostly solo in a small studio on gallery art instillation design, animations and films. But also it is able to scale up well now to much larger studio pipelines too.
The Alembic integration is really good and stable as well. I’ve been able to use Blender alongside Maya now in full TV production recently under very demanding circumstances and it’s more than held it’s own. It’s possible to import whole dense character rigged scenes from Maya to Blender now. Add effects and other stuff in Blender and export back to Maya. And you can do it the other way around too. And it all matches up beautifully. This was never possible until very recently.
Anyway I don’t know why I’m I even posting this. Anybody that needs to know this probably already knows.
All the best. Keep safe everyone.
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There is a dwindling number of people you can refer to as the “old guard”, those who have defended Blender’s lack of standard features as well as its quirks since the NaN days.
They have attempted to paint everything from lack of Ngons to lack of GI as good things, as they claim it forces the artist to learn the craft rather than be lazy and have the computer handle everything (even though that is not true). They also tried to paint basic things like raytracing as detrimental to the art, the good news for many though is that most have since either moved on or have embraced modern features and workflows.
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Sorry everybody for pointless post, brain fart…
Not sure what you’re referring to but flat shading is used in at least two professions : texture painting (obviously) and animation (for reviewing in “silhouette” mode)
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Exuse me… is it a joke?
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Haven’t you heard ? it even dropped support for 3D meshes
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I heard Blender 3.0 won’t do let you do anything except rotate around the default cube.
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I personally went back to Wings3D for modeling, Carrara for UVs and Amapi for scene assembly
Still gotta find a decent rendering package, ideally one that supports triangles
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That is a valid complaint to expose that lacks in UI may lead to a deteriorated UX, compared to old school Blender ; that were faster to use because they were offering a lot less options to deal with.
But that is ridiculous to say that 2.9 should support outdated stuff or is less powerful than a version of software that is older of more than a decade.
I would not complain about exporters/importers, physics or rendering features. Those things have been improved and are still improved.
But like @pitibonom said, there are some stuff that should be managed differently (display modes, brush management, properties layout, etc…).
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wow… sad news '(
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