coming from the VFX industry I have always found Blender very frustrating to use but loved it's speed, stability, and development. But because of UI, workflow, lack of Alembic for ages, and industry mostly shunning it, I like most stuck with Maya, Modo, and a little Houdini.

I have been re-evaluating software for my company and looking to ditch Maya when I subscription comes up and so was evaluating all the big 3D DCC packages when I came across Blender for Artists. It is a fork of stable Blender so it is up to date with stable releases but the UI and workflow are ohhh so much more artist friendly, especially if you are coming from standard tools. If it proves worthy on the pipeline side it might win me over from Houdini which also just had a fantastic new release but obviously a huge difference in price once you have to move off Indie licensing onto standard. 

So for those of you that like Blender but not the UI and workflow, try this
https://www.bforartists.de

Free Range
My IMDB