I see a ton of people talk about how difficult blender is/was to use, but what I found funny is some of those same people use VIM..
Blender took me almost the exact same amount of time to learn as 3ds, but honestly once I got used to blender, I actually find 3ds harder and more confusing to use and actually changed a bunch of keybindings to more closely match blender.
I think they started improving the UI with version 2.5, and now with the 2.8 release the UI is very user friendly. I still find the undo stack confusing sometimes.
Blender took me almost the exact same amount of time to learn as 3ds, but honestly once I got used to blender, I actually find 3ds harder and more confusing to use and actually changed a bunch of keybindings to more closely match blender.