Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).
Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.
Blender definitely has a non-standard UI. There are settings that make it more "standard". You can set it to "Maya" mode for example.
But, pretty much all 3D software is hard to use and takes several weeks to understand. I spent at least 3 weeks on both Maya and 3DSMax just going through the manual a chapter at a time and working through the tutorials back in the day. There's just too much to do in current 3D software and there's no escaping that all of them are huge huge apps.
Maybe VR or AR will finally fix this?
Note: I'm not apologising for Blender's strange UI. It put me off Blender for years and I'm sure it still puts people off. That said, a few months ago I tried it again and found the "Maya" option which at least meant I could click on objects to select them and have the camera controls match. The rest is still overwhelming but that's true with all top end 3d packages.
First time I tried to do anything with Maya it was hard as hell. Then it get easier and easier and... then I was able to move to 3D Studio, or XSI, or even Softimage 3D (maybe not the deepest nurbs setting ok). They mostly all work the same, except for some outliers (because they go another direction, like in ZBrush, if it can even be compared), and after all that, you have Blender. It's not just strange : it's often backward, borderline, annoying.
A bit like Gimp is not working like Photoshop, or Corel Draw, or... it's Gimp. Some people love it, Lots don't.
Since then there has been a UI team, which has tackled the low hanging fruit... the bigger design changes probably will come over the next year or so during their 2.8 revamp... where they tackle the bigger issues with blender.
blender is slow
blender is too hard
blender is hard to use
I know this because I was so frustrated as a newcomer and took a screenshot that I still have today.
Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these:
blender is hard
blender is damaged
blender is confusing
blender is free
blender is slow
In 2013 Andrew Price led an effort to work with the Blender community to point out why so many people have difficulty with Blender's UI. Check out the video & transcript here: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-wh...
Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).
Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.