New Blender UI - The Proposal

To be fair, Blender is better than 99% of the projects I've ever seen, commercial or not. AND they are open source, AND they have a great community behind, AND they are also great at promotional bits like this page itself, AND they are being backed by large companies. So IMHO it's one of the best executed desktop programs while also being in a massively difficult field, and they deserve the praise. In many places there are outliers like this; Stripe for Documentation, Wikipedia for encyclopedic knowledge, Google for search, etc. The two main criticisms that I've found is that first the interface is very confusing (but this has been improved constantly in the last 5-10 years!). As a personal opinion, I believe this video was a big inflection point (Blender seemed stubborn before the video, but this video at the very least softened the opinion of Blender): ▶ this video The second one is that it's not "industry standard", but as more and more people are using it for hobbies and indie projects, this will def change eventually, so I'm not too worried about that as well.

I think you mean either 2.5 or 2.8. 2.49 was the last one with the really inscrutable old UI, 2.5 was a big overhaul but still had a lot of basic functionality buried behind hotkeys or menus, and 2.8 is the relatively recent one with a lot of that basic functionality exposed. I don't follow the blender development process too closely, but I think Blender Guru's videos kicked off a lot of the 2.8 design work: ▶ this video Along with lots of discussion elsewhere as the actual redesign was underway link

> Andrew Price's improved UI mock-up did look pretty amazing ▶ this video if anyone's looking E: After watching it, I have to say it has a lot of good ideas, although the dynamic ribbon stuff is probably too much (how did I get here, how do I go back?)