A bombastic title, but aside from sounding like a 6th-grader I would like to raise this as a valid point.
I found Hugin when Photoshop CS2’s panorama would not be able to create any sort of useful panorama. Seriously, it was like you’d overlay two pictures and draw a gradient mask between them, it was that bad.
Today, Lightroom’s HDR option compresses to 16bit hdr and neither it nor Photoshop can handle 360° equirectangular projections.
There is PTGui but from what I’ve seen it is essentially identical to Hugin; in the best case it works exactly the same and offers a little more functionality like normalization of the resulting hdr at the seams. Greg Zaal said something about PTGui being different, but no elaboration followed and it seemed like he didn’t really know much about the software.
I looked around to fidn some Hugin support forums or groups, and the only relevant group I found was on google groups - which was populated by people talking about d, a, b, distortion factors to power of 5 and 7… basically software developers. This leads me to think that there is no real user base for the software, which strikes me as odd.
It isn’t as easy to use as PTGui and in my experience has done worse results. The userbase is tiny. There isn’t that much demand for the generation of 360 HDR panoramas. 3D artists use ready-made ones and regular people use software in their phones or ready made 360 action cameras.
I met @gregzaal at BCON16 and he told me he switched from Hugin to PTGui a while ago (at the time) because it’s more powerful. I don’t know if he’s still using it but if so, by now, given how productive he’s been, I bet he knows more about the software than most of its other users.
Anywho, why is Hugin not as big as Blender, the answer seems simple to me : Compared to Blender, Hugin is a very small program. Blender is orders of magnitude wider in its range of use. The size of the web community is just proportional to the impact it has on industries and jobs.
As for the Google Group, don’t worry, it’s not just for experts and developers, although they are here too. It’s actually a great mix I think. You can ask a question and sometimes get help from an expert (and feel guilty for not understanding the words they took time to write for you so you feel obligated to do some research and then you learned stuff!), and at the same time the developers can see what the users need by seeing them rant (or politely request features and be grateful for their volunteer work. urgh, boring!)
Why do they use a Google Group and not a Discourse forum like everyone else?
I’ve asked them and tried to convinced them but so far without success. To summarize, the main reason they gave me is that a Google Group can be used as a mailing list, which means you don’t need an account, just any email (I don’t have a Google account and I still post there). But to me it’s not a valid reason because Discourse can also be used as a mailing list.
There is a Hugin category on discuss.pixls.us (a great Discourse forum for all things FOSS graphics software) but I personally didn’t get any response from my posts on Hugin there. The Google Group is definitely the central place.