I agree, Vue is a great tool, Poser is a great tool, but comparing them to Blender just seems so out of touch to me.  You sound like you're talking about the Blender from years back, not the current one.  They updated the interface and even I can understand it now, and even as we speak, there is a project underway to make further changes to the interface.

The reason I recommend Blender over the other options is because he obviously works with figures, and if there's something he's needing but isn't getting from his current setup, I fail to see how Vue is going to fix that.  Vue is a bit like Bryce in that it's best thought of as an environment that is used to bring things into to render them, but the problem with that is things never work right when you're reliant upon two different software vendors collaborating to get something working.  We're lucky these days if they can get their own products working, let alone collaborate cross-program developments.

Blender has no such issues, because you can do absolutely everything inside Blender, no need to import or export, it does everything from the first poly to the finished video (even the editing of the video in postwork).  That's basically where I'm coming from here.  You can design, build, sculpt, texture, paint, rig, animate, render, postwork - anything.

If Nyghtfall were to list everything his dream package would let him do, I would be very surprised if Blender doesn't already have it, and even if it lacked something, it will no doubt appear because others will want to see it too.

I think think you're a bit disillusioned as to the popularity of Blender.  The amount of tutorials for it and the amount of views they get suggest that Blender is pasting over the competition quite happily, it's evolving at an alarming rate!

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What's that you were saying about popularity?

That was Blender four years ago.