I love vim, and I love Blender, and I've been using Blender on and off at a hobbyist level for about 15 years now. I hadn't made the connection before, but I suppose they
do have certain modes of thought in common. Both have a pretty bad learning curve, but I really enjoy all that you can do with them after learning.
I also used 3DS Max around version 4 for a class. The UI was more intuitive, and I felt like it would be comparatively painless to learn to do some impressive things relatively quickly...but doing 3D work as a hobbyist, and not one with much money when I was the most interested, Blender became my default. Gmax was pretty cool too, but at the time I was more interested in making pretty renders on a Linux machine, and less interested in creating game content on a Windows machine.