I don’t think that Lightwave ran on the Toaster, the Toaster was more of a rather large and expensive dongle. I would have loved to have a Toaster system back in the day, but I just could not afford it. I had to live with the likes of Sculpt 4D and Aladdin 4D. 
You have to realize also that LightWave was a fairly primitive tool initially with the first version of the Toaster. Even though Stewart and Alan had higher hopes in the long run for the tool, the initial use of it was to create geometry for what we would more or less consider, MoGraph today. It was meant as a tool that video producers could use to take the transitions and other effects to another level and even create stand alone scenes. And this is why LightWave has always been strong on compositing.
An example of something produced in that period using LightWave
I think most people who have added or switched to other software have a less emotional view on this matter, they do know lightwave, and comming back, if it offers something needed feature and workflow wise, is just a question of hours to get familiar in it again. But I also think you won’t get them back to use it to the same extend like they have before. (and I do think this will be also mirrored in the tv market, but can’t say enough on this)
Yep, I have to say, even if I had the money, I’ve gotten so comfortable with Blender that LW seems weird to me, which is kinda funny. When I open it, I’m like, oh heck, how do I select something? Strange how I used to think the Blender workflow was convoluted, now it makes perfect sens and LW seems odd, yet when I first started with LW, it made perfect sense. Of course, could be me getting older. 
I know exactly what you mean. I have had that happen coming back to LightWave after a number of years with Blender.
But generally speaking it speaks of a common mistake people make. I think it was Jason Westmas who first pointed this out years ago. And I thought, this guy hit the nail on the head.
People confuse unfamiliar with unintuitive. And intuitive with familiar. Getting familiar with something means working at it. And even something you assume is more intuitive than something else, is only because it was previously familiar. Walking wasn’t even intuitive -at first. Nor was riding a bike. But when we worked at it, and were able to do it, it became familiar and thus, intuitive.
And people complain about Blender and say it is unintuitive and lacks stantards. What they really mean is it is unfamiliar.
So what happened to you there is LighWave over time became unfamiliar. And picking it up and starting to work with again it was unintuitive and therefore you can now make the mistake and assume that Blender is in fact more intuitive than LightWave. Which is really not that accurate.
Am I right?
They say necessity is the mother of invention. But it is also the patron of work ethic. You need something bad enough. you’ll work at it hard enough for it to become familiar and thus intuitive. Not matter what it is.
Get a user not having used Solidworks or Blender, so not familiar with either. Have him make a circular array.
Which one do you think he finds more intuitive? Things can become intuitive once familiar of course, but to me intuitive means things are easy to learn even without any familiarity. I “learned” Solidworks in a week or two (the stuff I need for everyday work, which is just scratching the surface). I have much more familiarity with Blender, but I still have to go online to figure out a good way to do circular arrays - many ways to do it, but no dedicated and intuitive tool.
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You are confusing intuitive with easy or customization of a tool.
Take adding thickness to a mesh. There are many ways and applications. But the easiest and most common can be done in Blender using a Solidify Modifier.
But this does not mean it is more intuitive. A circular array modifier might also be simpler than other methods. But again not more intuitive.
Really when you examine all of these things, they can only be intuitive if they are previously familiar.
For a thickness modifier to be intuitive, you have to first be familiar with adding modifiers and how they work. Then intuitively adding thickness would be only possible if you are already familiar with sliders which are then intuitive. But in order to for sliders to be intuitive they had to be made familiar. They go back to real world hardware. Sliding something up and down to adjust volume or EQ for example. But even in the real world it is not intuitive, it is just simple. And easily made familiar.
If you have ever mixed sound before you will know that sitting down in front of a 24 channel board will be overwhelming. Each slider and knob may be simple. And easy to become familiar. But the entire process will not become intuitive until it is fully familiar and second nature.
You take an engineer who has worked one of these boards for a number of years and he will fly through a multitude of adjustments fast and intuitively.
But to get to that point, he first had to study the schematics of the board to know what knobs sent signals where, and what sliders related to what signal buses. And how he has all of this patched into effects and so on. Only then does it first become familiar and then finally intuitive.
But you take this same engineer and you sit him in front of a computer screen. If he has not ever learned to use a mouse and a computer, it does not matter how previously intuitive mixing sound was, and how familiar the knobs and sliders were. The mouse is totally new ground. He has to learn a new concept and a new dexterity. And he will feel it is not intuitive. He is uncomfortable until he becomes familiar enough with the mouse for it to again become intuitive.
You take someone who is familiar with sliders and using a mouse and give him a program to mix sound that looks and acts like a real world counterpart and in no time he is up and running. Not because it is more intuitive. But because he has already spent hours and hours on all of the component parts to make them first familiar. So it is not true that a mixing program is more intuitive, just because it has sliders and knobs.
It is only more intuitive to people who have spent years becoming fluent in mixing and fluent in computers. Then, for them, it is easily intuitive in a short time. Because it was first familiar.
Mixing with envelopes on a timeline might be a lot more useful and easy to control with much more precision than an automated mixing console application that requires the recording of slider and knob movement.
But it won’t be intuitive unless the concepts of curves and key frames first become familiar.
So even a slider on a tool in Blender has a history of first being familar. It is not in itself intuitive.
And a tool designed to make a radial array is a custom tool. But the controls must be first familiar and how the tool actually works has to become familiar before it will ever be intuitive.
People just forget the time it took them for earlier concepts to become familiar. And make the mistake that something is naturally intuitive.
The reason to think of it this way is that it is better to understand that anything can become familiar and then intuitive rather than limiting yourself to things that are already familiar.
Therefore you will go further as an artist. You will be free to explore things.
If you limit yourself, you wont.
This is why some people simply miss out on Blender. They mistake intuitive for familiar. It is their loss.
Absolutely, I liken it to learning a new song on guitar, you can fumble and fumble, then one day, it’s second nature, then you don’t play it for a while and suddenly it’s “How the heck did I used to be able to play this?” 
I think it’s far harder to have several package you swap between when working than sticking mainly to one package, there is the inevitability of choosing the wrong keystroke, i’d imagine it means you have to work harder and be more focussed. Like ‘g’ in Blender and ‘T’ in Lightwave for move. Plenty of room for colourful language when working. 
lol yes. I struggle with this all the time. And I get tripped up often. But what I am also finding is that over the years I am better and better at switching. So a new concept has come into play. Kind of an expansion of muscle memory. So rather than having a “habit” for just one program, I maintain a habit for Blender, Maya, LightWave and so on simultaneously. So as long as I am always using these same apps all the time, my habit is maintained. But if any one of them drop out for a period, then coming back it is like ooops… lol
But also it is a neat way to discover key strokes you did not know before. Like ctl Space Bar in Photoshop is zoom and in Maya it is toggling full screen. A happy accident.
Usually I need an hour or so to get again into it, with some mishapt here and there surprisingly T and G are not the main issues, its more about the less often used commands like (F)ace and (P)olygon.
As for intuitive and non-intuitive… difficult subject. Especially if you count in workflow solutions. The point is although each 3d application do offer you a wide range of options to do things, there is usually a “path” or “a how to do things the easy way - list” in each application wich might differ greatly from other applications. If you do know the general workflow (=familiarity) of the application your chances to use the “right” workflow intuitively are much greater.
A prime example for non intuitive workflow might be the old way in blender to paint textures: The familiarity is there, (select an image, paint on it with brushes) but how to select an image was non-intuitive as hell.
I started using LW back in 1995 (not sure what version that was), and I used it quite a lot up until Blender 2.5 came out. As I got more familiar with Blender, LW started to look like old tech, and it quickly started falling behind for me tools-wise. Since Blender is free, it’s gotten numerous addons and features added that have made it top-notch, and LW couldn’t compete with that (for me). The only thing that kept me going back to LW was its renderer, and now I don’t even open it anymore since I find it awkward and clunky to use.
I was excited when NewTek announced LW Core and it had the potential to be a great program. Too bad it was abandoned and swept under the rug, the reasoning being that they didn’t want to break their top-end users, who relied on LW to meet production schedules. Well, NT could have developed Core alongside the existing version and released it as a separate product until all their users made the switch. Some would argue that this would have been too expensive and there would always be compatibility issues between the two versions, but instead of further developing Core, they came up with TWO separate programs that had some of Core’s features (even though Nevronmotion is a plugin), so don’t give me that crap.
I agree with Colkai in that no matter what the next version of LW looks like, it has become too expensive to consider an “alternative” to Blender since it does everything I need it to do… for free. I really enjoyed my time with LW, but I’m afraid that whatever comes Next (pun intended) is too little, too late.
Well, this wouldn’t be a Lightwave speculation thread without the opinions of actual Lightwave users.
A few users on Newtek’s community were not thrilled with your statements, but looking elsewhere you see an increasing amount of unease and uncertainty amid the combination of no certain release date for Lightwave Next and relative silence from the developers.
So - Going to be blunt,
I think that NewTek should focus on updates to ChronoSculpt and making NevronMotiona standalone mocap tool.
There are large markets for both of these tools especially nevronmotion as a standalone tool. I just do not want to buy an outdated tool like lightwave. 
The loss of key talent has crippled Lightwave. However it does not have to be the end for NewTek.
They have been developing what they call Lightwave Next for quite some time now. It supposedly is fixing the long standing issues with LW and bringing it back up to where other software is today (new render engine, viewport, PBR…ect). Supposedly it wont even be backwards compatible.
If they do follow through and succeed (hard to say at this point), then it wont be the end for LW. The blog updates are sporadic at best, but the last post was about a month old.
Well you are going to make a video about LightWave. You completely ignore core. Ignore that that technology is being fused into current LightWave. Completely ignore Bullet Dynamics, Flocking, Instancing and other enhancements. Completely ignore the updates to the blog over the last year or so. A new PBR engine, geometry engine, new volume and hair rendering, new performance improvements, deformation improvements, the addition of OpenVDB reading. And maybe a few things I have missed. All demonstrated as working - on the development side through dev videos.
And you want to be taken seriously?
If you had been around the community at all lately you’d know that we complained heavily that they had announced the next version of LW and we did not know anything about it. But they also were trying to sell the fact that the licensing would change and to “buy in now” to get a better deal later.
So obviously. They answered with the Blog.
And if you have been around NT forums at all over the years you’d know that this is the most information they have ever released ahead of the release of a product. Ever. So they listened.
But if you are familiar with the NT community you will know that this still did not please everyone.
What else is new?
The LightWave community is a finicky community, one minute praising LW3DG for their efforts and the next bashing them for whatever reason, and it is always the usual suspects. I still don’t know what direction they are heading, or even if it would be worth even the discounted price I get for upgrades, but right now Blender is doing everything I need, and I am even considering switching over one of my large projects to Blender that has gone stale lately because of the uncertainty of LW, backwards compatibility, rendering… Sure I could use 2015.3 for some time, but I find myself in Blender more often for mesh translation/fixing before sending to other apps.
Is Lightwave dead? o.O
That will not happen, because devs of both are not working anymore at Newek. I mean there was only one update I think after release, you can not take that as serious development.
I do not hope LW user base will ever be larger than it is now. I do not see any competitive advantage LW has.
It has plenty for some people. Sure. I have seen people over the last year or two showing up on the forums moving over from Max and Maya. And a lot of LightWave users really hate Blender. So where does that leave them? Well missing out in my opinion… lol.
But lets get real. Software users are extremely diverse. Just because Blender offers a lot of things we think are so cool. Does not mean it is attractive to everyone. And so there is always the person who will gravitate to LightWave.
And the upcoming features are going to make that even more attractive.
Bumping this thread, because there was hype a while ago over the supposed release of Lightwave Next in three months (which would place the date around now).
Even among a number of avid fans, the morale of their community is going down and some are starting to jump ship (this indicates that NewTek simply can’t afford to hold the release much longer if they don’t want to start losing the userbase). This is clearly becoming make or break for the company. If LW Next isn’t all as it’s advertised to be, the application risks joining Truespace and XSI in the graveyard.