Well it could be more positive... ;)danyargici wrote: I respect your opinion but as far as I'm concerned they put a tremendous amount of energy into developing this tool and frankly I can't paint any kind of scenario in my mind where this can be anything other than positive.
If they really want to compete against commercial apps, first of all, a bit more of modular approach wouldn't hurt. Developer of Max plugin should be able to develop the same thing for Blender too, with similar effort. I don't think this is the case, for now, or at least, don't know for any 'port', except that V-Ray patch. Compatibility with commercial apps should be priority, instead of 'integration' of another open sources. I don't see Alembic support, yet. Also, I think you'll know does anything changed about Collada since some Softimage users complained around 2010 . Ok Collada is a bit off these days.
Now if it's not possible for them to compete in 1:1 ratio, maybe exactly POV-Ray is (still) a nice example of smaller ambition and better result. While it also relied on 'patching technology', it was only a renderer, only ray tracer and conceptually very clean, which created a room for number of auxiliary apps, some of them were commercial. Also this (imho) created a mythical, exclusive status, somehow comparable to Houdini today.
Blender today, it's looking like blurred picture of commercial 3d, collection of programmer's show reels having some nice features here and there, but free of charge is still a main argument, that's it.
In any case, I think they should stop with 3 or 4 version yearly. One day while ago I simply lost the energy to customize every new version again (because never ever been able to transfer the all preferences in one go), and 2.71 is my last Blender, for now.