Quote - It is the dream of every 3D "pro" to work for Pixar.  Or at least so I've heard.

Strawman argument. Pixar isn't the only joint in town.

Quote - While it's true that the right types of tools can help to achieve desired ends: it's also true that the best tools which money can buy don't matter nearly so much as the competence & the talent of the tool's wielder.

Another strawman argument: Nobody is saying anything at all about the user's skills - it's about the pretense of a program that claims to be professional level, but clearly is not. A skilled CG artist can probably construct a beautiful mesh entirely out of POV-Ray scripts, but it obviously hampers the timeline and workflow - for the artist as well as for his teammates who have to work with the results.

Take the low-poly meshes in PPro for instance: If you're spending vast amounts of time to modify the things for use, when someone else spends a fraction of the time grabbing pre-made chars or building their own that come out already usable for the project, while you're still struggling to morph and push yours into usability, then deal with fixing/redoing what the exporter didn't get?

That simply isn't professional-level, y'dig?

Bad car analogy time: If I worked as a car mechanic, I would vastly prefer using pneumatic socket wrenches to a manual ratchet with a screwdriver duct-taped onto the handle. ;)

Bad programmer analogy time: If my co-workers use and need C++ code from me, and I hand them Visual Basic script converted to C++? They (or I) will waste time picking through and cleaning out the inconsistencies and excess crap that got in there during that conversion process. I also wouldn't expect to keep my job for very long if that were the case.

/P