Anyone who has done both manual retopology & Auto retopology knows that Blender severely lags in this segment.
You can use Retopoflow for manual retopology but it is quite pricey. Now there is also a free version, but it’s not allowed to be use in commercial projects + it can’t handle more than 4-5 Million polygon.
Blender’s inbuild option like Polybuild tool, F2 with Bsurface etc. are there, but that workaround is quite convoluted.
Regarding Autoretopo, you can use decimate, but it doesn’t always gives you the desired result . You can use Quadremesher, but then that comes with an extra $100 cost.
Shouldn’t blender.org need to take look at these drawbacks first? I mean there is lot to be desired from the general modeling & sculpting tools. This is the backbone of the DCC & in the last few updates it barely got any attention from the team.
Not all of us are working procedurally.
Even the recent change with Modifiers is a step back imo. They have added an extra click on the way.
This is complitely and exclusively up to you how to interprete this and deal with this, but developers of retopoflow have zero legal rights to restrict anyone from using free version for any kind of work including commercial one.
Retopoflow are under GPL license which clearly noted in blendermarket page, and which clearly follows from the fact what retopoflow contain as an addon.
Despite this, in my opinion retopoflow are convoluted, have poor UI/UX and broke the most important feature - ability to use all the tools/addons which you also have in blender.
In maya you doesnt have such problem cause retopology are part of the maya.
For blender the better solution (in my opinion) are PolyQuit + Draw X-Ray (payed version with auto snapping) + Volume Preserve Smoothing (from the same developer of Draw X-Ray), which almost (not entirely) recreate “maya” way of retopology.
Decimate modifier has several modes for several results.
Its Collapse mode can be influenced by weights of a vertex group.
Its Planar can take into account boundaries.
Its Un-Subdivide mode just tries to un-subdivide according to base mesh topology.
Those modes were not created to produce a quadrangular remeshing.
There are used just to lower polycount.
To obtain a quadrangular result, solutions brought are Remesh modifier and Remesh panel.
Initial solution for Remesh modifier was Smooth method.
Then, since 2.8, OpenVDB method is the default.
Developers searched for a more specific solution with better results, between existing opensource libraries.
They opted for Quadriflow.
Next to that, they tried to improve retopo process by adding a dedicated overlay and by improving snapping tools.
A tool to draw polyloops have been abandoned by lack of availability from core developers.
Retopology, Textures workflow or Physics are areas where it is difficult to obtain advancements.
They are secondary compared to others, in core devs mind.
For Retopology, Basic Modeling, Geometry Nodes and Sculpting are prioritized.
For Textures workflow, Sampling, Lighting and Shading are prioritized.
For Physics, Animation and Rigging are prioritized.
So, those areas are often ending up as orphan modules. And they may not be touched between several refactors of prioritized areas.
If I where a character artist who is dependent on good retopo tools, I would buy Topogun 3 and never look back.
It’s a standalone tool that does nothing but retopo, It costs 150 bucks, so its not really cheap, but they do sell permanent licenses and its profitable in the long run since you are independent of other software (and their lack of improvements).
I’ve never used it, so take what I say with a spoon of salt, but it looks to me like its the most sophisticated retopology tool that leaves all others behind (by a lot!).
Even Maya’s quaddraw looks amateurish and old in comparison.
In that case I would rather consider purchasing 3DCoat, it has almost same level of Sculpting capability as Zbrush, Voxel Sculpting is massive for concepting. It has one of the best Retopo & UV tools + You can do great hand painted & PBR Texturing as well. Comes with Perpetual license. It is making strides in Polymodeling as well.
While I will keep Blender as my Polymodeling & rigging + Animation & rendering software.