I always laugh at these comments about Blender’s interface. Have you seen how cluttered Maya looks? With rows of icons/buttons above, below and to the sides of a tiny, cramped workspace?
Way back in 2.5, the Blender UI was reorganized to take full advantage of modern widescreen monitors. That clean, uncluttered setup is why Blender has long been known as the fastest modeller around.
maya’s power comes from the underlying systems and their extensibility & all of that is thanks to the original developers from Alias & Wavefront,that’s what enabled Maya to be an industry standard till this day, having access to DG/DAG nodes early on provided more flexibility for TDs,Riggers,Programmers & even Artsits to expand on that which led to wide adoption from studios so maya is what i call “battle hardened” an it’s aim was always for big production in VFX & Animation ,however Autodesk might not be known for new innovations in the CG world, but they are good at scouting & acquiring best softwares and 3rd party plugins since the 90s like Arnold,Softimage,Xgen, Mudbox,UVlayout,modeling toolkit & hundreds others from the past which gave them the edge over other softwares ,blender took a whole different direction until now & i think blender foundation goal was always to serve indie & small teams instead of big studios due to not having enough funding or a large team to expand especially blender is free and open source, but we can see today some studios & professionals are interested in chipping in… i think the first step is for Blender Foundation to change that goal to include everyone even big Studios & the first move would be to remove this kind of wording which i found on the Manual & many other official docs, it might not seem a big deal but it’s the first step for inclusiveness.
Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process.
Arnold is one of the most powerful VFX/Film production renderers in the world. Not exactly designed to render a sphere on a plane, a more realistic showcase might be the space station scene from the film Elysium that it rendered. Try running that scene through Blender/Cycles. 
It’s only now that it’s fully integrated into Max/Maya that it is enabled for GPU. CPU rendering in its native VFX/film environment is not a problem when you’re running a render farm with 1000s of cores.
I do my rendering in Max/Arnold and have recently started using 2.80. Cycles and the node editor is easy to use, but nowhere near as powerful as Arnold on more complex scenes with instances or displacement, with 1000s of objects and 10s of millions of polys, or complex and deep shader graphs.
2.80 is fantastic and I’m having a lot of fun learning/using, but(maybe this is a beta thing) the whole thing just falls apart with any kind of complex scene that Max/Maya wouldn’t even blink at.
This is the performance side of things blender 2.8 it’s for the features and blender 2.81 will be the performance/speed
Sculpt 3D was the bomb on the Amiga, back in the mid-1980s! 
I believe this legendary Juggler Demo animation took something like 24 hours to render in 320 x 240 pixels.
Most big studios use their own modeling/animation tools that aren’t available to the public. Maya is used in a lot of studios but if you’re a great artist and can produce stellar work — that’s more attractive to companies than the tools you use to create it. Understanding Maya backwards and forwards will be a bonus to companies so it’s easier to train you on their tools.
As for Blender’s collections… I find it much easier to manage scenes now that it was before. The only issue I’m having right now is how to render the scenes out in “layers” for compositing. I just haven’t taken the time to figure that out yet.
I tested arnold on Maya houdini and Softimage. Fine but cpu ssslllooow.
Then I found redshift and never looked back. Comes down to render times and quality.
Multiple gpus bitcoin mining rigs modified for rendering. No need to get
expensive multiple CPUs. i7 6950x broadwell is $1600 that’s 3 RTX 2070s and change.
The RTX 2070 claims realtime raytracing in games.
Gpu or some offshoot will be the future of rendering.
I’m testing cycles in Softimage great GPU renderer for free.
Will test side by side with redshift when time permits.
This industry is a baby compared to other disciplines and will grow and grow.
I’m just happy to have been part of the birthing process…you all should be.
It’s exciting!
Will test arnold gpu beta as well I suppose.
Cycles has a way to go but a great start. When it can handle gigapoly without a choke and can import
say speedtree FBX with wind and have the ability to instance thousands, then we’ll be talking.
C4D has the same problem chokes on gigapoly scenes.
I’m very happy cycles has been ported to softimage just to give it a whorl…
Cycles is a modern unbiased pathtracer. Of course it’s a capable renderer. The point here is that it isn’t as powerful or capable as Arnold for multiple reasons. Also, Blender itself isn’t able to handle gigapoly scenes with 10s of 1000s of objects in the same way that Maya or Max can. Hopefully in a year or 2 it will be able to, but not now.
Exactly my thought before blender catch up on this and would say more 2 to 3 years since autodesk viewport performance tech is very advanced.
@geminga C4D can handle one gigapoly mesh with ease, what it can’t handle is too many objects in a scene, even if the total polycount is low. Its a known limitation.
2.80 visuals are really nice, but performance-wise it’s far behind Maya/Max.
They don’t have anything like Eevee though.
That’s right but i heard they have something in the work but for now it’s only rumors…Blender 2.8 is definitively a game changer since many software developer’s are closely following the evolution.
Ah, the old FUD game. Maya 2019 was such a disappointment, maybe 2020 will be better.
Except Blender has it now.
Always keep in mind that competitions is always good for the end user since we benefit from it in many form!
Yes, the visuals are the nicest of all the 3D programs, but the performance is very poor in comparison. I’m pretty confident that this is just a bump in the road, though, and that 2.81 should address this. The poor performance is really going to hold it back if more Maya/Max users are going to switch over.
I strongly disagree, was there thought the same, today I think its one of the top interrfaces out there…
still some features missing, but the interface is one of the best features.
some familiar sounding names comming to this forum lately 