Blender is not actually that bad. 3D modeling is just a hard job. You have to make a set of 2D tools that are fundamentally conflicted with the 3D work you're trying to do. You cannot realistically use Maya or 3DS Max in a professional setting without also learning a raft of keyboard shortcuts and non-standard UI.

I keep hearing this "Blender doesn't adhere to common UX standards", but nobody ever says which particular parts are the non-standard UI elements. They don't use a standard UI toolkit, but that's not the same thing as not using standard UI design. I look at it right now and I see: tabbed documents, buttons, sliders, textboxes, accordion panels, all in relatively easily recognizable formats.

You have to right-click instead of left-click to select things. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training.

But there are some things that are just not going to be easy. There is a reason why materials are separate than textures. The modifiers interface has actually been drastically cleaned up and things like particle emitters greatly simplified within even the last year. Where it has "non-standard UI elements", it's because there is no standard UI element to do the job. The shader node editor is quite intuitive, if you ask me.

So again, if you're going to complain about a specific thing, please cite specifics.

So save your money and put the effort into Blender. 3DS Max is not $5000 better than Blender.