I work around lot of graph designers, UI/UX artists, 2D animators, painters, etc. All of them get ton of Blender content in social media because of their interests, and they usually get hooked, especially by Grease Pencil. Then they usually search for it on App store, ask me why it’s not there and get disappointed.
I think there is a big market Blender can reach with tablet support (there’s a reason this was quite high on feature list in survey), and unfortunately most of it is on iPad. And those are professional workers who can become contributors. There is sort of gatekeeping going on often in Blender community, where only AAA detailed, baked, rigged character models are considered professional work, but if you work in an advertisement studio, and create simple colorful experimental work in it, that’s also professional work. What Blender can offer on tablet is 100% ready for professional work. And AAA asset makers were never the audience to use tablet anyway.
However, I also teach Blender to those people and I know their frustrations. Their interests primarily lie in painting, and this is exactly the area that makes them lose interest. Lack of serious texture painting, not being able to paint on multires models. I also don’t think I’ve heard this before, but my students are very annoyed by the fact that you can’t paint color attributes on hair curves.
So I do think Blender on iPad is great, and lucrative project, but I worry that showing Blender’s painting system at the current state to it’s prime audience might create bad impressions that will be very difficult to change in the future.
Sculpting alone I don’t think is the feature that should be flagshipping this project. Audience I’m talking about will never be happy with just sculpting, they’ll never want to move files on PC to finish it. They’ll want to create art and finish it. And they’ll want to paint on it.
I would suggest Grease Pencil as the first step, but the general feeling in these circles after Procreate Dreams is that animating on iPad is just too inconvenient after a honeymoon phase, and can’t really work for what they want to create.
Therefore I think painting experience should be taking priority over port, especially considering it was #1 request in survey, and it probably remains only part of Blender that hasn’t been updated or is in the process of updating. If painting is good, fast, 3D, and textured in Blender (imagine having to work with nodes on iPad), then Blender on iPad can reach big numbers.