Yeah, well that steep learning curve everyone is complaining about for blender is about an hour. After that, you'll probably be doing rigged animation.

In my opinion, people associate cost with value. Something that's free MUST be worse than something that costs thousands of dollars.

Solidworks frustrates me because, as you describe, it is very easy to jump into and get moving, but once you start needing more advanced modelling or more intense surfacing, solidworks becomes an unwieldy beast of secret features and unintuitive workflows. There are many pros who scoff at this and just power through (like all things, solidworks is just a skill after all), but as a lower end user sometimes I just through my hands up and use a more intuitive modeller like rhino at the expense of solidworks powerful features such as the feature tree.

The 20 grand per seat price tag doesn't help much either