I've been using 3d for quite awhile. A lot of the programs I've used have had pretty "gui" like Bryce, or Poser. I've also used Maya and Softimage. I've just recently started using Blender. But things I am very impressed with thus far are its powerful modeling tools and strong animation system. And the animation system is going to see some nice improvements! As to the interface. I've found that the interface is one of the most well thought out (recent versions of blender mind you) interfaces out there. Its vector based so you can zoom in and have lossless viewing, its fully configureable on the positioning of everything, you can have all the toolboxes on the right side of the screen, or on the bottom, you can split the bottom into three layers and have a full screen view of the scene. Or you can even split the view into 4 views. Of all the applications out there its one of the most flexible I've used, if not the most flexible. You can see the advancement of the interface overall here: http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/235UIControlsDesign What is amazing about that is thats in the course of only about 2 years of work. And not only was the interface improved but the modeling tools, the renderer, particles, texturing, uv mapping, a few hundred bug fixes, etc etc really the amount of work the open source team does should put most commercial developers to shame. I agree with most others, while the interface is nice, its non-standard, so if you have used other applications it may not make sense to you at first. But I mostly have caught on, I mean its not that difficult to figure out how to render when the button is labled "render":) The default rendering quality sucks, I agree with that. But with some changes in settings and on objects it renders some very nice renderings. And the fact it is compatible with quite a few different rendering engines you have a lot of flexiblity. My vote is for using it, and if nothing else, add it to your toolbox. For free you can't argue:)