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.