Pros :
Cons :
cycles… (+/-)
the minus is. that is imho just super simple pathtracer. would be really nice if it would be bidirectional. or at least it had. some sort of GI cash.
It seems . . . odd . . . that we would be looking a gift horse in the mouth . . .
THIS IS TROY!!
XD
Dont be shy tell us what you think.
It’s just a sharing experience thread, not a suggestion or complaint box.
And anyway Santa Claus doesn’t care of your opinion simply because he doesn’t exist.
The reason why undirectional pathtracing has been a priority is because it’s literally the only way the engine could support useful tricks such as ray visibility (can’t have something like the lightpath node in bidirectional tracing).
It’s also why other render engines such as Renderman only offer their complete feature-sets with the unidirectional mode.
i think it depends on what you are using blender to accomplish cause blender does alot. it’s a game engine, modeler, etc.
one can’t expect blender to be perfect at everything but i do think for what it does blender is awesome.
It may not have all the feature of the professional tools but
the fact it doesn’t makes it good. I like the simplicity of the interface. I think there is a lot to consider when asking that question
ultimately, alot of it has to do with the skill of the artist. I think the only thing preventing a wider adoption in professional community
is hesitance to adopt the tool. once more artists try blender, they will see it’s benefits.
The game engine is actually really nice, if you know how to use it,
and UPBGE is getting awesome 
there are only a few things left on my wishlist and they are do to land in upbge in 0.1.2
(static draw call batching and hardware armature skinning)
The weaknesses I feel are no ability to directly output a GLSL shader from cycles.
Modeling is top notch in blender if you know the shortcuts, and procedural texturing in cycles is super fun.
I need sculpt more and texture paint more but that is my own weakness.
we really could use some sort of depth painting tool that also paints on multiple texture channels
other then that, once PBR lands in 2.8 in the GE and the Viewport I don’t think anyone has anything to be sad about.
particles are fun how they are, but I would really like to see ‘temporal spawning’ for each particle on a timeline and each particle has a animation keyframe system. (including physics)
this way you can simulate and overide and then simulate again after the overide.
i would prefer bidirectional stuff 10x times over Ray visiblity and lightpath…
It’s not just lightpaths, but things like the fresnal/layer weight node can’t easily be made to work with bidirectional paths either.
In that sense, Cycles would probably need that Disney shader patch merged in first so you can for sure have a convincing uber shader that would work.
Thank you for all your answers 
!
If you work with older hardware, one of the weaknesses is that updates will sometimes break things. And breaking compatibility is often considered streamlining, so doing a bug report doesn’t help. You have to go all the way back to 2.76b for the most overall compatibility, and that’s even if you manage to get the newer OS and updates to run on an old machine. Main thing being a lot of stuff lost on the ATI/Radeon end with the way screen rendering was changed. Mostly too much stripped out in OpenGL that couldn’t be back-ported for unknown reasons, transparency and such completely borked even though it’s completely supported in spec going back one version.
Some updates also break workflow stuff, so there’s that too. I guess the problem of what’s broken or downgraded doesn’t always get a mention, but it can be annoying or frustrating when you run into it.
So even though the software is free, the optimization paths used by the development team isn’t always the best for users that don’t have $$$ to throw at hardware. I suppose it’s considered more important chasing after fractions of a second, when you just want it to work. This aspect can undercut one of the big advantages of software being free, depending on how you’re able to do things.
I suppose that big con doesn’t detract too much though, if your focus isn’t on best speed or newest features. One of the big strengths of Blender is that archival downloads are still available, and it’s able to run from a folder. So you don’t have to worry too much about an update breaking what’s installed, and regardless of what happens for good or bad you don’t lose access to the older versions of the software.
My big complain at the moment are the fluids, very basic, and makes Blender crash if you push them too hard, no foam or white water is also a bad thing for quality FX, also the fact that the new Alembic import does not support UV mapping, or maybe I am mistaking here?
On the plus side, great modeling, love the UV tools, they just need some getting used to!
So, for my current projet I am using Blender for modeling and UVs, and Houdini for FX and rendering.
All this said, Blender is an awesome tool, especially considering the price!
I like blender’s “duplicate window into New window”, it’s easy to see different views easily when working. Still miss the convenience of the marquee by dragging the LMB. Not sure if can see/edit multiple uv islands of the selected separate meshes without using “draw other objects” or combining the meshes.
Pros (strenghts):
Cons (weaknesses):
NOTE: My “cons” are from a critical side with the hope that someday blender improves in these aspects that I think are basics. Blender is the most versatile and powerful software I have ever known for everything it offers, but although it is very good at everything, it sometimes fails to lack basic things like the ones I mentioned in cons, but with the pros you have enough to do any production you can imagine.