I work in VFX and the workflow I use at work would be prohibitively expensive to use for freelance and personal work. I also desire to have a legitimate workflow at home, so Blender offers me similar quality for pretty much free (addon costs).
Not enough people consider this as they are so used to just downloading whatever they please, but to me, relying on piracy is not a wise move. So Blender was the obvious choice.
After 10 years running my studio based on Max and Maya, we use Blender simply because it´s better in general.
Cheers.
The tools and the fun!
Modeling. On my opinion the modeling is “optimized”. Meaning there are the quickest and best ways to make things.
Almost everything for me is model and apply subdivision modifier at some point.
I use inkscape, gimp to add to blend files.
Shake is as much a favorite tool for me as Blender, however my current mac is very old and also I have no homenetwork
so its a pain.
The python should be my main reason to love blender, but I havent had ideas how to utilize the power.
There are a lot of things that would be awesome to understand about Blender, such as render passes.
rendering passes and then finish in gimp.
Houdini was mentioned. That is an interesting software, there is few things incommon with Blender.
I use to teach Houdini a course. However it is the most dificult 3d program I know, esspecially to
actually do the wierd things it can do. However with the simulations, particles and python same
things are possible in Blender is my opinion.
Initially - because it’s free and small size.
These days - I’m already used to hotkey driven workflow so menu / icon based stuff of other programs feels slow and cumbersome. Also addons and customizability. I don’t have any programming experience but even I can cobble some menus or pies together just by copy pasting which further improves speed and comfort.
I came to blender because of FREE, but later it revealed something that made me look at it with another eye…
Long time ago i used to use 3DMax, but working on another field for quite a long time made me losing connections with 3D software (except for CAD). One day i decided to do something personalized for my son’s birthday and looking around for available software, i found 3DMax and Adobe Premiere had changed on prices, use policy etc… then on internet i saw many pages promoting Blender as good free software. What could i have lost if i give a shot?
And here we are after 1 year and half 
Started with making a birthday wishing and ended with discovering i could make animations, or i could make fast personalized games for my son, or i could design fast a 3D prototype project-idea, or etc… Well, all started by the FREE PRICE.
Anyway… are there things i don’t like? Yes there are a few. Coming from C, Basic and Pascal and finding all usage is based only in a Python dialect only, i find it a little discouraging (personal opinion on game engine) and also game licensing matter is another point of things i dislike, but in general i love blender.
Sorry for making out of topic question: Couldn’t be possible that BGE have other languages integrated too and if possible even a review on licensing or technical parts update? Anyway I would like to thank all the guys for wonderful videos on youtube explaining things on BGE.
I use Blender these days as my primary 3D app whenever possible simply because I find it the most pleasurable to use. The fastest. And the most fluid and most efficient for my time.
Put most simply. I find that it’s simply a joy to work with. And as was just mentioned, there is just so much fun and optimism around it. The community aspect is inspirational.
It’s often said that Blender is not optimized yet for studio pipeline use. This looks to start to change after 2. 8. But right now as a stand alone generalist 3D app for independent work I think it surely must be the best thing out there.
If anybody is starting up a solo or small team based project then I don’t think you could do any better than choosing Blender.