Hi Marek, I’m not a developer, I’m a professional blender user, but I’ll give you my opinion on what you say.
Start by saying that I agree on the bottom of the question of what you say, although some examples seem wrong (Blender and its 3D cursor improves performance as a modeler a lot, maybe not in that particular rotation, but the average is to give an incredible speed). And probably attract haters, although there are not many here.
But going back to the main thing you said… Yes, Blender Insitute completely ignores all professional users. It doesn’t matter what we think and say, it’s my vision after wearing blender for 8 years. We are completely ignored, not by the programmers themselves (with whom I had a very good relationship), but if blender as an entity. It doesn’t matter what we tried to be heard… We don’t matter at all. And there’s not a single attempt to want to change that. My only way to explain it is that blender is the toy of a few people in their search for ego/success. Because I just can’t find any way to explain that a program like this hasn’t changed in the last decade the left click when it’s a value in the configuration that would have attracted tens of thousands of users. The only explanation is that someone has been embarrassed to admit their mistake during all that time. It is a childish behavior that guides many of Blender’s decisions.
Another perfect example would be the idea of eliminating the wireframe mode, which I don’t know how there was no one there saying it was crazy from minute one. It is clear that there are no real users helping in the design. This means that while users can make enough noise for the wireframe to return, they can’t make the same noise for a hundred other things.
During the last 4-5 years many professionals and users have asked for a series of changes in the usability of blender. To the point that some changes that you comment seem to me minor, there are much more serious problems. In blender 2.8 has been taken and ignored practically all those requests for changes that were minimal changes for what ultimately has been changed. On the other hand, the interface and abstractions of the program have been profoundly changed, without any weighty reason, in what seems to be a personal project of a couple of people who don’t seem to know how to use blender and who often seem never to have used it. And practically nothing has been heard of the changes that were requested from the professional public that in the end we are the ones who earn the salary using blender.
You can imagine this has generated a lot of anger, to the point that an hour ago a good friend of mine, after two years using blender decided to “send to hell” Blender and go back to Maya. Because he is tired of them laughing in his face. A professional looks for the same professionalism in the program he uses, and not to change things because someone has woken up one day with a magical idea. And that’s what blender seems to do, which doesn’t care about users (especially professionals).
I do not believe that anything that is said here is going to change anything. Not the points you comment, but in general. Blender can never be a tool to which one can entrust their salary because that is what is sought from the blender institute. That “freedom” that in the end means to ■■■■ professional users who have no voice or vote because as there is no connection sales / users there is not much we can do. I myself lost a job opportunity last week by saying that I was using Blender to model even though I made it clear that I could use the program they used (3DsMax). How do you transfer those problems to the Blender Institute? the amateurism image of blender doesn’t seem to matter to BI.
Maybe in 6, 8 or 10 years blender is a very established program but it is clear that it will not be thanks to the decisions that are being made today at the level of usability, which seem to be aimed at allowing disabled people to use blender, instead of professionals. It does not seem that we want to understand even the 3D industry, how expensive are the productions, the importance of the pipeline, third party tools, confidence in the tool … At the end blender seems more like an intermediate point in the way, a novice learns blender and one day he knows that he has to jump to another program to be taken seriously. Which is not the case with any other program.
Would it be okay if this changed? Well, it would be great, but I’m going to go back to Maya as the main software so I don’t worry about my future. Would I say this if I used other software? I don’t think so. And I would like it to change, but I don’t think any of this will change.