We all hear about the big feature but small changes make silent apparitions in Blender. They may be small but their effect can alter the workflow quite significantly.
The two that I noticed the most are:
zooming around the mouse pointer position: it has the potential to accelerate the workflow quite a bit but, for some reason that I find strange it doesn’t recenter the view around the pointer position. Because of that zooming when the pointer is near one of the 3Dview border make little sense since one can’t see what one is zooming on… I had to set the MMB to pan to adapt but doesn’t that pretty much defeat the purpose?
objects are created without any rotation by default. I know that some people want this but not me for sure as lots of my modeling techniques rely on the new objects to be created in aligned to the view. I can’t find a preference setting or a command to cancel this. Someone found it before I run crazy?
<Edit> OK found it into the Edit methods of the Preferences. Thanks.</Edit>
And objects are put in object mode by default. I thunk they’re trying to make it “more user friendly”, ie a little bit more like Autodesk. I think this could get a lot of users using Blender both starting from scratch and migrating from commercial apps (pretty funny how such little things can get people to quit blender). I know that one of things that confused me most when I started was the whole edit mode thing as opposed to Editing Context and the way as soon as you add a shape, but then add another, modifiers would go on both (because they’re the part of the same object).
Right, default ObjectMode at birth.
Finding oneself in EditMode from starts is disconcerting I understand, especially since not all (if any) 3D apps have separate Object and Edit modes. I cancelled it nevertheless since I more than rarely need straight primitives.
On the whole question I welcome that Blender becomes more new user friendly. There’s always time for configuring it for maximum efficiency afterward.
These little changes can be really very welcomed by new or migrating users. I guess for me as a Blender user is more simple to change my old habits accordingly or change default set-ups than risk that possible new users will be frustrated by these tiny details.