[Smerity]

Very good point regarding the UI.

I find it quite annoying when people complain about Blender's UI. VIM's UI is also not "new user" friendly but VIM's UI itself is very powerful.

Blender and VIM are made for speed with familiarity.

[georgemcbay]

I agree with you to an extent but one important difference between VIM and Blender is that VIM tends to be the only tool a VIM user will use for editing code/text while a 3D artist will often use half a dozen or more tools to create a finished product (using focused tools in different areas of the pipeline -- it is not uncommon to use a focused modeller, say, even though technically you can model in Blender or Maya).

When you're using half a dozen tools and all of them either ship with or can easily be configured to handle Maya-style camera/mouse movement and Blender alone uses some wacky non-standard interface, it can really be jarring to context-switch to the Blender UI even if you are already familar with it.

I believe this lack of following de facto standards (and prior to 2.5 having no way to really configure to these standards) is a bigger factor in the rejection of Blender's legacy UI than the fact that it is hard to use for a beginner was.