Wow, this was a qualified and well-founded statement.

But just shows again the weak side of Blender. The UI is simply not made for everybody

the question is if a gui made for the masses is very desirable. :p

Just when you want the masses to be able to use it. That's true

I know this problem very well. This is a trade-off. You have to find some kind of a good way to please both: beginners and advanced users. But both groups need quite different interfaces.

Professionals:
If you are used to a program and if you are skilled user then you want something like the UI from Lightwave: key-shortcuts and much space for modeling. You dont want to have the interface in your way. You dont want to have bright ugly buttons, distracting from your work and your design.
You want a perfect UI with each function on the best logical place, easy to get.
Since modeling differs from text-processing the UI will differ very much from text-processing.
You have to learn something new to become a master.
XSI, Blender, Lightwave and ZBrush are like this. They are clearly made for professionals.

Beginners:
But if you are a beginner, then you want to have colorful easy to read buttons, the more the better. You want your program to behave like another program you know, maybe like a text processor.
This is easy to understand but not efficient.
I think MED and Milkshape are something like that. Even Max and C4D tend to belong to this category. The huge amount of MAX warez-users proves that I am probably right with this assumption.

Later you will understand that it is bad to press buttons again and again for the same task. You will understand that some new concepts and ideas like an edit-mode, a sculpt-mode and similar are new but make much sense. There are no comparisons to the well-known world of text-processing.

I wouldn't call me a beginner. And i am in heavy trouble with just using hotkeys ...

No, you are in trouble if you use the mouse only. Even in a text-processor I use almost only hotkeys. I use hotkeys in my programming environment. It is much faster to press F9 to compile instead to go into a menu and select one of these options there.

In a modeling software I do so many tasks again and again that I simply HAVE to shortcut. I HAVE to use keys otherwise I would need three times or even more time for the same task. I use move, rotate, scale, extrude again, again and again. It would be really dumb to not use hotkeys.

But yes, you can go into menus and call these functions via mouse-click in all these tools (including Blender). But this will take much much longer.

If you really use a tool like that then you use hotkeys automatically. If not then you are not using this tool, plain and simple.

just to throw in there:
i hate Max's overlapping window interface. i had to use it for work experience, so the next day i brought in my laptop with blender on it and did everything on that before exporting to Max. maybe there's something i can do about it, but i will not because i have perfectly good free software that never has that problem and has a very useful and infinitely customisable non-overlapping window interface.

i don't think that it can be argued that blender is less easy to learn. instead, people are just more likely to be accustomed to a different interface, and hence reject blender's.

julz

well, the gui is the only point keeping me with cinema4d. i am used to it, i can use shortcuts there, too. its the same with photoshop and gimp. i am used to photoshop at work and thus am having great trouble when using gimp at home, so i am very happy that i am allowed to do private stuff at my workplace

but i wished i would have the strength (and time) to dive deeper into blender since i'd love to use it for more than just fluids

That's the point. I don't use the mouse only. The UI of my favourite render software is highly customizable. I use a few hotkeys, i use buttons for the rest. I use what makes more sense and what is more comfortable for me.

But yeah, i am no professional. I am not under the pressure to work as fast as possible. I have the time to scratch my left ear with the right hand