I love the idea and concept of Blender and the spirit of the Blender community, however despite the work on it's user interface, I still hate Blender's gui... Confusing as hell and as equally frustrating...

Believe me, I used to think the exact same way about Blender not too long ago.  I've been a 3dsmax user for almost 15 years now, and needed to find a potential replacement, because I feared I couldn't afford the expensive upgrades anymore.  So I tried Blender, and hated it because of the frustrating UI, and found it very difficult to understand how to do even simple models, and couldn't find the tools I needed, and so on.  Anyway, long story short, a user here in the forums turned me on to a few simple addons, which have made life so much easier. Have you tried using the Pie Menus, combined with the Dynamic Spacebar Menu and Icons addons?  Those 3 included addons made my experience so much more enjoyable, and really made learning the software EASIER.  No it will never be as easy to learn as Hexagon or some other Icon-driven UI software, but having all the power behind Blender, and the ability to create anything just the same as in any high end software apps in a very similar time, made it well worth the extra effort.  I was very surprised that I could literally model anything in Blender that I could in 3dsmax, and in some cases, even faster.  Sure, there's things about Max I still miss to this day, but overall, I've been very impressed and amazed by the depth of features in Blender.  It's not easy, but so far has been very worth it.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.