When I first saw Andrew's proposals, I was in total agreement.  I'm STILL in total agreement.  I will say that I do think Blender is extremely powerful, and can do almost anything the commercial counterparts can do, but it's without a doubt the most difficult software I've ever attempted to learn.

Once upon a time, I learned the very basics of polygon modelling in apps like Ray Dream and Corel Dream3d (these are long gone now). Later, I moved on to 3dsmax, and it only took me a few weeks to learn the modelling tools and modifiers there, and get back up to speed.  Later in life, I had to learn to use Maya for a job I applied for, and I was comfortable enough with it to learn the UI and tools needed in about a week.  The tools performed similarly to 3dsmax, and used the same naming conventions, so it was an easy switch.  I've also picked up other apps like Silo, and Hexagon, and once again, they only took a couple days to learn.  Then I began learning Blender, and months later, I still feel like a newbie.  I'm sorry guys, but this software is difficult to get used to, especially if you've ever used ANYTHING else for 3d modelling beforehand.  Please understand, I'm NOT knocking Blender here.  I'm just stating my opinion, and quite obviously I'm not alone.

All visual and graphical things aside, there's also serious inconsistencies in Blender's UI when trying to model things to scale.  Andrew touched on these in his proposal, and I think they are the most important issues.  You can set the scene units to mm or whatever measurement units, but not all of the numbers in every tool obey those units, and often display only arbitrary numbers.  Anyone coming from some of the large corporate apps will have a real hard time accepting this, and some may find it unusable because of it, like architectural or CAD guys.

I don't know.  I think the Foundation should recognize that there's a world of alienated users out there who would love to switch over to this app, if it were not so unorthodox.  Maybe catering to the "old guard" is what's keeping it from becoming a standard?  Just speculation, but I think that's what Andrew was also hinting at.

That all said, I think there has been lots of improvements made lately, especially if you use some of the addons like the pie menus and such.  They've really changed my workflow for the better, and saved me from having to recall so many hotkey combinations.

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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.