It took ONLY 10 YEARS for Blender to finally get a new UI folks:
So if you were 30 years old when you first criticized the Blender UI, you are now only 40 years old!
I love how responsive the Blender foundation is. You ask and receive in only 10 years! 
You find it easy to deride things that you don’t really understand, Georgie. I’ve noticed this.
First off, welcome to the discussion. The 2.80 overhaul has been the topic if much discussion here and elsewhere for the better part of a year plus. Better late to the party than never.
Second, it’s not that it took 10 years of “moaning,” as you so succinctly put it. Creating a whole new UI and UX isn’t a trivial affair, especially with an open source project. There are a lot of players on the board, a lot of structural considerations, and so much coding and testing. You don’t just prototype it in PS and then slap on a new skin. That’s not how it works. When a UI is so tightly integrated into the entire experience, no change is made lightly or swiftly. It’s the same reason why the NewTek team cannot simply integrate Modeler & Layout overnight and why the various changes to both Maya and 3dsmax took many years.
Third, if the UI was not overhauled earlier it’s because A) there were many more pressing concerns than UI/UX that needed addressing first, B) various plans and resources need to be shifted into place before change occurs, and C) it was only the larger non-Blender community that was clamoring for change, not the current users. The established end user had no qualms with the UI or UX situation. In fact, they were quite happy with it in light of how unevolved the pre-2.4x versions were. 2.79 was loads more polished than earlier releases. Also, whenever you’re dealing with a large community project, you have to handle it like a massive game of chess. If you don’t, everything falls apart. To my first point, keeping Blender relevant was something more than UI related. The BF was far more concerned with keeping its features robust and up to date than tweaking a UI that only the non-user seemed to complain about en masse.
I get what you’re saying. However, 10 years is hardly as long as you might suppose. Some of us have been in this very community for 2x as much time and have seen certain apps change far less. Also, the only ones moaning are the ones who couldn’t see the larger picture. UI is a nothing burger thing. I would rather deal with a program that was powerful, but complex than one that was easy to use, but rudimentary. (This seems to be, imo, the Houdini philosophy too, fwiw.)
Having said all of that, please chill with the rhetoric, rants, and obsessive use of emojis. CG Talk is a community of professionals. It is not a sub-reddit for you to act like a child on. Comport yourself as if you were in an office. Here, you are among your professional peers and quite possibly clients or employers. Thanks.
That does matter though (of course!) - the idea, surely, is to make Blenderites out of as many people as possible? 
They had. There is a reason why i started the Blender Fork Bforartists.
Cookepuss, imho you don’t even cover a fraction of the truth with your opinions
What do you mean ‘10 years’? You mean because it was 10 years ago that 2.50 was released? Or 10 years ago was the first time you tried Blender?
I think people were criticizing the blender UI 20 years ago, but it was a small number of people who used better known 3D apps and could not get their heads around blender’s UI. At that time most blender users were also Linux users and most simply had not used other more standard programs before. It was only when blender started getting “gee-whiz” features like fluids and soft-bodies that large numbers of people wanted to migrate to it from other platforms and found that it was just too alien for comfort.
It was not a handful. It was a big number of users who got scared away. I have seen generations fail at the UI. And i have seen this happen at a daily base in more than one community. UI is one of the reasons why Blender never arrived at “the industry” for many years. It’s just, you will never hear about such things in the Blender bubble, where all news just is that Blender is so great and all is well.
Blender is a monopolist in its area. It’s the number one hobby tool. And it’s free. While the big ones costs thousands of dollars. That’s why they got away with this awful UI for many years, and still managed to grow this big. This finally changes now with 2.80. I find it great that they finally take UI UX design serious.
And Blender was always multiplatform, not Linux. Ton is by the way a Mac user from what i know.
I’m sure a large number of Mac/Windows users looked at blender throughout its history, but the number grew much higher as blender proved itself more capable. I made it to the turn of the millennium before leaving the Amiga for Windows and didn’t want to end up using the same programs (3DStudio, Maya) that I resented for never having supported the Amiga when it was still viable. I wanted something more like TrueSpace or Carrara with 3D interaction and mouse based UI. While blender might have been muti-platform, its reliance on the keyboard for everything is something I assumed could only come from the Linux ecosystem. And while I’ve read that the first version of blender (possibly before it was even called blender) was written for the Amiga, the Amiga community would never have embraced that UI. Blender did well among Linux users both because of the lack of commercial competition at that time and because that community could accept a keyboard dependent UI.
I have always been curious as to why ZBrush never gets the same level of heat that Blender gets regarding unconventional UI’s.
I assume its because ZBrush brings something unique to the CG table, and so it gets some slack.
Blender didn’t start on Linux, but on IRIX on SGI. This is partly why the whole UI is drawn in OpenGL, because Blender was originally written against IRIS GL, the forefather of OpenGL.
ZBrush did not start out as the sculpting/modeling tool that it is widely used as today, but rather a “2.5D” painting program. So yes, from the very beginning they were in uncharted waters and it’s still surprising to me that it evolved into an industry standard application. Blender, on the other hand, wasn’t doing anything particularly unique. They could have looked at similar programs on other platforms but apparently just chose not to.
http://zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/
I should not have said Linux ecosystem, but rather the larger “*ix ecosystem”. I know this is hugely oversimplifying but I’m talking about the difference between people who drag and drop files vs. those who have a console or shell open at all times. My first memories of seeing Linux in use reminded me of my first attempts at using blender, everything I’d normally do with an icon or widget required knowing key commands instead. So it never surprised me that Linux users often claimed to love blender’s UI while people used to other platforms’ conventions tended not to.
I stopped reading where the article claimed that Blender is one of the industry leaders …
Propaganda does not replace tools.
Blender’s capability by far exceeds it’s ‘price point’ : ) for pro or amateur alike, despite an inoculated immunity against established convention.
So all-in-all gets the job done at day’s end which is essentially all that’s required, methinks.
That’s the culprit already. There are quite a few jobs that you simply can’t do with it.
When it gets your job done then all is well though.
Not a terribly difficult task mate, when the price is Zero $$.
Daz studio has a highly versatile humanoid figure platform( Daz genesis)
will free export to industry formats( FBX etc)
NVIDIA IRay render engine.
A dynamic cloth engine that is BETTER than the one in maxon Cinema4D
( as it actually works on moving characters)
Basic Lipsinc from audio files (unlike Cinema4D)
And they just added a spline based dynamic hair system that is very nearly
as capable as the hair system in Cinema4D.
All for the price of a free download from their site.