If Photoshop was Maya, Blender would be much better than GIMP.
IMO Blender is still worse than Maya (but not by that much), although Maya is also substantially worse than Photoshop -- to make a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
Maya has always been the gold standard for animation.
Modeling, not so much.
Softimage has been discontinued by Autodesk.
After all we've seen from Autodesk (buying out and discontinuing the competition and forcing the customers to migrate to subscription licenses) I think it's unwise to ignore Blender if you are serious about 3D.
Who else used to get a hard-on from seeing the footage of jurassic park animations in Softimage? I remember building up a machine with a Glint card back in the late 90s just to be able to fire up Softimage..
IMO Blender is still worse than Maya (but not by that much), although Maya is also substantially worse than Photoshop -- to make a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.