Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.
This new interface is great because it's easy to use for Maya/Max people, and it's still similar-enough to the 2.7 era so as not to alienate long-time users.
I'd also go so far as to say that the 2.80 UI overhaul has slowed me down a bit. Things that were a single key stroke away are now an extra one or two. Menu items have been renamed and rearranged (often for the better) but now I have to go hunt for them and relearn them. If these help Blender become more popular, then that pain is worth it.
Bravo to the Blender team!
Every action I take, I can no longer be confident about my "guess" of what it will do. It's like the door handle problem, where you see a strange unlabeled handle and are not sure that you need to push or pull to open the door. Then you tried to push, since that's the convention for all the door in this building space. The door doesn't open. Then you tried to pull, and it works. Maybe pulling to open the door is better than the normal convention, but sometimes it's not worth it to sacrifice consistency.
I think the new changes are for the better :).
A couple years ago, I learned to use Blender through cgcookie tutorials and googling. Nothing was easy, but everything made sense eventually. It really makes me appreciate the free tools and learning resources we have today.
You cannot explore it, and that's the problem. RTFM is required.
> it's easy to use for Maya/Max
When I was 14, with not prior 3D software experience, I first attempted to use Blender (it's free!). After maybe 20 minutes I gave up trying to add a sphere to the scene. I figured out the Max interface in less than a minute.
Change aversion is a factor, but it also alienated complete newbies.
When it comes to user experience, blaming the user is the worst sword to fall on.
It was clunky, kind of like Gimp's UI, and felt like a remnant of the 90's. Usable, sure. Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not. Our tools should feel nice.
Major kudos to Blender on this.
> Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not
That's subjective, but it did support themes and DPI scaling.
Its true that the new ui is an improvement - it looks cleaner and I guess things like left click to select is more intuitive. But the old blender ui wasn't as bad as people make it out to be and lots of things that sucked before like the ui for for hair particles are still pretty bad in the new ui.
The main issues new users have are often related to management of the deliberately non-modal UI which allows you to split the main window up in any way you like, kinda like tmux. With 2.80 tool sidebars now have big clear icons instead of rows of buttons with sometimes impenetrable words written on them.
Ultimately the 2.80 UI is much the same as the 2.79 UI with a more fashionable dark UI and a reworking of some idiosyncratic design choices (changing from right click select to left click select etc).
UI design in open source software has been greatly under appreciated though... Maybe its having a revival
I'm an occasional Photoshop and Illustrator user (longtime Fireworks diehard, though, RIP) and while some conventions make sense to me, there's plenty of things that I have to look up tutorials for, even if I've learned them before.
Sometimes different software is different.
Yet many artists make amazing stuff with ZBrush.