I consider Blender much more user-friendly than Max, Softimage, Modo and ZBrush (to list the ones I've used). With Blender I found that I got frustrated a lot less because the work flows for the most tasks I did were streamlined and efficient.

Consider what you're learning. If you've never ever done 3D modelling, it will take much more time to learn just because you need to first learn the principles of doing 3D modelling. My SO is doing exactly that in 3DS now, and I can clearly see it takes her much more time to figure out what to do than how to do it in the program itself.

That said, a lesson often forgotten (or perhaps never acquired in the first place) is that learning requires some minimum structure, discipline and focus. To give you an example - I've been shying away from learning Paredit for about two or three years of my Lisp coding experience. Then one day I decided, "fuck it", I'm taking time to focus on learning it. It only took two pomodoros - literally less than an hour, and yes, I timed it - of reviewing the documentation and practicing (I took a big function, stripped the structure out with M-x replace-str to remove all parens, and then restored the structure using only Paredit operations) to become pretty proficient in the mode, and now I'm that much faster in working on Lisp code.

I've repeated this experience several times in various places - it's surprising just how much you can learn in an hour if you actually focus on it. Sometimes you have to invent your own exercises, but then again, maybe you have to learn how to learn first :). And yes, I do explicitly schedule time for "learning how to learn" in areas I'm not very familiar with, in order to make the actual learning more efficient :).

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As for getting full zealot for open source - I do agree it's an existing phenomenon. But at least in my arguments for Blender and Emacs, be sure it's not open source zealotry. I'll argue just as strong for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and against OpenOffice. The latter just sucks, in a death-from-thousand-papercuts way. So does Linux as a desktop for non-tech people. Open Source seems to be a negative predictor for quality for tools that are a) above some level of complexity, and b) not for developers.

Still, my primary argument is - a powerful tool will necessarily have a learning curve; the longer and steeper the more powerful a tool is. You can try and make this curve easier to traverse, but ultimately you can't flatten it in any other way than by making the tool less powerful and less useful.

You should give it a shot. I was rounding up, actually. There are YouTube tutorials that go from zero to animation in under 20 mins. That includes rigging.

Or don't and just bitch about elitism. Up to you!