It's just a gut feeling instead of a proper evaluation of different apps, but I always feel Blender and Houdini are made by developers who care, while other 3D packages are, well, not.
I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun
I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!