[zaphar]

Blenders interface is built with power users in mind. They've made some progress in reducing how steep the learning curve but they still have a ways to go.

Your right about how clean/responsive and fast it is. They have justifiable pride in how many features they include in such a small binary. When I was hacking on it Blender weighed in at under 10 megabytes with features other apps needed 100s of megabytes to provide. I think they still come in under 20 but I haven't checked in a while.

[dirtbox]

Blenders interface is built by programmers. There wasn't a visually creative bone in the UI designers body.

[mgcross]

I would have agreed a few years ago, but the interface has come a long way, especially with the 2.5 alpha: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Blender_2...