The excavator is a good analogy. The best-designed most graceful excavator will still be _hard_ (at least for more complex tasks).
BforArtists specifically exists to provide better surfacing of interaction to Blender https://youtu.be/0vEtTP0C0Cs?si=comeTyStz98t9-a0
Granted Blender 2.8 onwards and even 2.x onwards are huge steps up from the 1.x days, but it still has one of the most opaque interaction models of any of the common 3D DCCs
Just having a better way to customize hotkeys would go really far, and I want to my mouse and movement controls to be roughly the same as unreal engine. Until those two things happen I use blender but I'm always angry when I do.
There are 14 year olds making great use of it [1].
[1] https://variety.com/2023/film/news/spider-man-across-the-spi...
Blender is only "not intuitive" if you already learned to use a different program in the same or adjacent domain (say some CAD tool, or Unreal Editor, or even Paint 3D or Sketchup), as it's not going to be similar enough. Similarity to existing software is a good thing, but not worth it if you can offer much better ergonomics otherwise. Blender could, and did.
Blender "shortcuts" are most of the time one key, followed by others, alternative variations can be achieved with modifier keys (makes sense).
It takes very little time to see what the shortcuts are. Most of the time you can just hover by a tool icon, other times, menus have them clearly labelled by item.
At this point, you know the basics. Your human eyes are very good at perceiving changes in your FoV, and after inputting a key, the status bar presents information on alternatives modes or filters available for that tool.
Eventually, you start assuming (correctly) that other tools behave in the same fashion for a variety of things.
For example, you press "Y" (y-axis) after "S" (scale), and you scale on that axis! If you followed that by a number, you scale by that scale factor! And this can be applied to every other tool. Moreover, this and other combos make sense, are easy to understand. Whatever you may imagine as the effect they have on other tools is most likely the exact outcome.
Blender is very sane, it does exactly what you tell it to do. You do have to make the call, but when that is at a distance of a finger, it isn't an issue.
You can learn by just using it. Information is laid out to you clearly. Modifiers/filters are consistent, making their knowledge easily transferrable to different tools.
It cannot get more intuitive than this.