Aside: At various points I’d gotten deep/prolific in 3DS Max, Maya, Softimage, Cinema 4D, and Lightwave — but to this day, I cannot grok blender. I never get past using it for a day and feeling like the controls are completely against my brain.
It teaches basic modeling and texturing but in a way where you start picking up on the shortcuts and interface slowly over the course. There's not much that's intuitive about the UI but it finally makes sense to me.
Blender is another story. Its interface is a hazard, I can't even understand why it is SO terrible. Even saving files becomes a rabbit hole of nonsense due to how buttons are positioned and assumptions you make about what would be sane. It almost seems like an elaborate practical joke.
For money burning reasons I had to use 3dsMax when I was making games for the army. It had been years since I touched it, but a few days and it was fine enough for my purposes. Still wish they'd have let me use blender though.
In general, I actually like Blender's interface. I'd like it more if it was a little more vimlike (all the screen splitting stuff could be under 'Ctrl-W', for instance).
My problem with Blender is more about how easy it is to lose data. A reliable autosave would be amazing.