there is no standard in 3d software guis. if you sit a newbie in front of maya or houdini he will be totally lost without a manual or tutorial. it took me weeks to get somewhat productive with maya. have you ever tried maya or houdini or some other high end software like that? it would be interesting to hear your opinion about them...
i don't think you can expect to learn 3d software just by intuition without ever having to look something up.
when learning blender my biggest problems were the trackball navigation (until i found the preferences
- but nowadays almost every tutorial mentions the preferences first so i don't really see the problem with it) and that there were no transform widgets like i was used from maya (transform widgets got added as an option in later blender versions). i didn't have any serious problems with the rest of the gui.
I also talk about things like the odd DOS load/save dialogue for example. Gives me half an heart attack every time i need to load or to save something.
the normal windows file dialog wouldn't really work for blender since in blender the file browser is also meant for browsing into other blender files for appending and linking objects. if you absolutely need a windows file dialog you could open one with a few lines of python and put this python script into a menu somewhere.
Give me at least customizable hotkeys, that would help alot ...
they are working on that right now. it simply wasn't feasible to work on it earlier.
