Nobody expects 3d design software to be maintained indefinitely or expects 3d design software to satisfy future requirements magically. You buy a 3d design software to make you money by creating content. Either it makes you money or it doesn't. The easiest thing to do is to simply buy what everyone else is using because it makes it easier to hire talent from a pre-existing pool of experts, or if need be, train them on a software for which training programs already exist because its popular.
>If new requirements come up, they're at least not any more helpful than in-house resources (unless a lot of people suddenly have the same requirements at the same time);
Well, wait a minute. Before you even get there, you not only have to be good at producing 3D art/content (or atleast good enough to make a decent chunk of change), you have to now hire dev/test/pm folks and successfully run a software development team in-house. I don't find this to be a realistic proposition.
>and if they stop maintaining it, there's a good chance you literally can't do anything about that.
A vendor for any software that you rely on can go out of business. Do you plan to run independent software development teams for your OS, accounting software, browser, IDE, etc ? The answer obviously is no. And the same reasoning applies to your 3d design software.
>You just have a different set of unknowns, one of which seems more manageable (which is probably why it is more popular), and probably is more manageable in some subset of use cases.
I don't agree at all. I think it actually is more manageable.
