An old argument for those living in caves. For us who dont, we know thousands of free software apps that some never saw the light of the day.
It’s a brutal world for free software for a simple reason. People dont like to work for free. Thus free software always starves for more develpers, usually the no 1 problem they face.
Blender popularity may spoiled you, but make no mistake about it, Blender is an extremely rare exception and it has to thank the ingenuity of Ton for that huge success.
- Blender is popular as an indie tool, but it’s not enough to dominate the industry. Blender is making waves among small to medium sized studios, but it’s the big VFX houses that determine which apps. become the dominating force.
The indy game market and the AAA game market. AAA market has huge budget but they rarely make games, indy has ridiculously low budget and they make games one after the other. At this time indy seems to slowly overtake AAA, at least from the steam numbers I have seen. AAA are mostly big to huge commercial successes, while indy are mostly failures but indy games are so numerous that they add up to around a 50% of the global pc game market. By indy I also include small studios because the lines are a blur.
Most indy game devs are new to the industry , started with blender because they had no money and continue to use it because they are very good with it and cant be bothered to go through the torture of learning a new 3d app.
AAA games are made from companies that have long depended on specific software and stick to it because they know people who will work for them will most likely already worked with it, in some other studio.
- It’s not the number of features, it’s the quality of the features. Blender has some features which are not much more than a hack or a black box that has trouble interacting with anything else. Others have been hastily designed and are full of bugs (hence all of the overhauls going on or proposed with 2.8).
Its impossible for open source code to be a black box, its the exact opposite. About Blender features , go read reviews in magazines and online.
Steam in particularly is very funny because not only Blender reviews are insanely positively and there are a ton of them. The equivelant of the free/cheap software released by Autodesk, I think its 3ds lite or may lite something, dont remember , has been full with negative criticism. Many of them worth reading cause they are hilarious 
- Blender one of the top apps. for pros? I would love to believe that, but we need a citation from a source outside of the Blender community.
again read reviews. Golden age of internet, so easy to find them.
- Commercial app. stagnation is more the result of the Autodesk monopoly than being unable to keep up. Look at Side Effects to see an example of a company pouring its resources into development (Houdini’s development rate is actually a bit faster than Blender’s).
I dont follow Houdini, Modo looks its doing fine but again Blender belongs to the big boys, Maya and 3ds, its far more popular to Houdining .
- The part about close to zero funding is becoming false, the BF (together with the Institute) is generating well over 100,000 Euros annually right now (that is great funding for something free and open source).
Because I have been working with big businesses as lawyer for over a decade now, anything bellow millions is peanuts.
- Indigo, Maxwell, Fryrender, and other path tracers put physically-based rendering out there for all to see before Cycles was even born.
But none of them was cycles. Cycles has been dancing around other game engines for sometime now.And it was huge news for the 3d industry when it was released.
- The game engine part is correct, but the BGE failed to keep up with the rest of Blender and is now a pile of junk (the only thing that can save it is having UPBGE as the drop-in replacement and there’s no solid roadmap agreed by that team and the BF).
BGE was never intended to be a pro game engine. But is far from junk, our BGE forum is one of the most popular here with thousands of games WIP and finished. BGE is excellent starting point because of its ease of use. While its node based logic interface was there for more than a decade before Unreal got blueprints.
- Partial UI redesigns at least are common among commercial apps. (though a total UI change in one go is indeed uncommon).
Annnnnd nope
UI is a must avoid at all cost for redesigns. Coder have an inate phobia for GUIs , which is why most GUI suck big time and they want to have as little as possible to do with it. Their second fear is documentation.
No idea who told you that, but that is definetly not the case. Coders are extremely against any form of rewrite unless its absolutely necessary.
The vast majority of software out there remains unchanged. I had over a decade to use 3ds and i took a look at it and it looked like nothing it changed. Then I read the 3d world’s review and it said that nothing changed.
- Autodesk and friends don’t need Open Movie Projects, they have studios using their software and they are able to influence the direction they are developed (because they are the biggest customers).
I never said they do need
- User/Dev discussion is becoming far more common among the communities of commercial software houses (though results are a little mixed). Don’t forget that most Blender devs. do not like BA so much because of constant rancor in things like feedback threads.
No developer likes users. For the simple fact that users vastly underestimate the amount of effort it goes in. Companies has support departments for customers and you can be certain you wont find any devs in them. Maybe for small companies. Big companies if you get a repsonse its probably a smart bot.
- The BF won’t take in large and very complex addons, the idea is to make sure an addon won’t create too much of an addition to Blender’s filesize.
There very few large and complex addons, the vast majority are simple. They do however have a strict procedure for accepting new addons. If you dont follow it your addon will get rejected and rightly so. Too much crappy code out there for them to endure any more of it. Good luck finding other companies that will mainain your addon.
I do love Blender, but we should choose honesty over exaggeration if we want to see its propagation continue to grow.
At last we agree in something, I have been watching you for over a decade here, its about time you stop exaggerating in your criticism and realise that Blender is only get more popular not less.
At this point I only need to point people to steam reviews about Blender.
Talking about big company, my brother works for a big architectural company. I introduced him to Blender because he was not super happy with C4D and now after a month he uses only Blender for the illustrations and has been converting people at the company his is working as well.
Funny things is that I did not even recommend Blender , I warned him the UI is annoying at first and it wont be a smooth ride. As soon as he got over the basics, again he learned alone from online tutorials, I just help him with the hard stuff , he now practically lives inside Blender.
Nowdays you dont even need to open your moth to convince someone to use Blender, you let him use it and the end. It still has it quirk but Blender has reached awesomeness like no other 3d app out there.
