Yeah that was my feeling as well from the outside, a lot of really great tools (sculpting alone would be fantastic...) but I never liked the base environment, although I thought it was just getting too used to Max, as I found Maya or Modo just as baffling from ease of use standpoint.
Yeah you are not wrong, actually it kind of does relate back to this thread and that's the development cycles side of things. Its kind of a double edge sword, the fact that 3dsmax has 2 year release cycles (1 year bug fixes, small additions, 2nd year updated code base) is actually useful in production for not breaking plugins/scripts.
For example every scene I build I usually re-build in cinema4d and blender for assets that I sell. Sometimes these are as big as a living room, kitchen, etc. So getting all the camera/lights/render/displacement settings as close to 1:1 is my main goal. So back to my previous point, the first thing I tried to find in blender was camera/LUT matching (since curves/vfb settings change per render engine a custom LUT would be the quickest/easiest way to match across all software and engines (vray/corona/cycles) as curves (which is my preferred tone mapping solution isn't always able to be imported/exported). Sooo... I found an addon for blender which can do vertical matching/LUT however because the development cycle is so short it broke in the next version, people paid for it and the developer lost interest at some point and just didn't provide any support or even reply to emails. I can imagine this would happen regularly with other addons which brings me back to why I think even though its a bit painful wishing 3dsmax would develop new tools faster, having a slower dev time actually keeps functionality longer term, without changing too much of the inner code without breaking plugins this is a positive in my view, and this is where I see problems in blender. I rather have some continuity to my pipeline, especially when clients are paying me than be trying to figure out why things don't work as they should or they just decide to remove/change things because they can - this is my definition of 'too technical'. When I'm often looking for a button in blender ill watch a video from 6 months ago, that button is gone, and now you do it a new way and the documentation is often not helpful or lacking in detail. 3dsmax/c4d documentation is actually much better in my opinion. Vray probably has some of the best documentation I've read, I wish more companies would follow their path.
Just some food for thought, I think c4d now does half year releases but not sure at what point they change underlying functionality. However my hunch is Maxon have a pretty good understanding of these topics and I've rarely come across any major issues with pipeline breakages. I've even used plugins that are years old and they just work (not always but that would be 100% impossible in 3dsmax for example and certainly not in blender).
Always keen to hear other peoples thoughts on this too, I prefer not to think in a vacuum and I could always be wrong and happy to be so if you can alleviate my pain in some regards.
Another plus for c4d is scripting in python, its probably the easiest environment to automate/script for as 3dsmax's listener often hides things which can be a pain to hunt down if you don't know how to find that thing, where as python in c4d is quite straight forward.
