@Ghonma
I'm refering to recent times, the rate at which Blender is evolving is mindblowing and I'm not using that term lightly.

@Shane
Of course those tools are top-notch, they ought to be for the prices they charge for them, but that three-year thing is simply a corporate tactic used in many other industries, the idea being that you spend time learning their product and not that of the competition - that's all it's for - they lose nothing cause you would likely have never been able to afford it in the first place - that's how it works - corporate snare tactic.  The wise people will choose the product that is never going to cost them, ever, not even after three years.  The money and development situation you pointed out is pretty much irrelevant to Blender now, the product is evolving by plugin developers and they're knocking out mindblowing plugins at a rapid rate - no company owns Blender - people can do with it whatever they wish, take it where they want it to go.

Tools are tools, and one tool doesn't need to be the equivalent of another, my point being, there is nothing you can do in Max or Maya that cannot be done in Blender, and that's right now, nevermind the future.  But anyway, I'm not knocking the products that those companies produce, they're awesome, but their business model is doomed and no amount of corporate persuation tactics will ever change the fact that Blender will always be free, and a commercial entity cannot compete with that, nor can the artists who have to pay for those products when compared to those that don't.

So you learn Max or Maya, great, but in three years time when you want to continue to run the business you built around it, you will forever be getting undercut by Blender-based CG houses that don't have to pay out thousands of dollars just to break even on software costs.  The only way the likes of Adobe and Autodesk will survive in the future is to offer the product for free, and take a cut of the users commercial profit instead.  I reckon EPIC, for example, have already realised this and is probably why they're operating such a system for their Unreal Engine.

They could charge even a tiny amount, and they used to do that, but I think they've realised that the way to go is to offer it for free, make the source available, and take a cut of the users profit.  It's the ideal way for companies to survive among free software, and by doing that, people respect them because any company dealing with their product knows exactly where they stand.  It costs a person nothing, and only if they make profit, do they need to pay something to EPIC.  I like that system, I like it because everyone (even the poorest of people) get to use and create with a top-notch Game Engine, it's no longer strictly the domain of those born with a silver spoon in their mouth.  It's a good, perfectly fair system, and I think it's only fair that if you make profit out of using their software, that they should get a cut of it.

What I don't like is epically overpriced corporate manipulation systems, and that's what Adobe and Autodesk currently have in place.  They'll change their tune eventually because they'll have no choice, but even then, they'll still not have the benefit of a totally free system like Blender - and most people prefer not to pay than to pay (especially when you're in business where expenditure matters).