> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.
I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.
I still have trouble creating issues in Jira because it's never where I expect it to be. I know it's at the top bar somewhere, but even after years of it being there, I don't expect it to be there because it feels so unnatural.
> IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do.
I feel that the way that Blender has succeeded so brilliantly at exactly that is their master-stroke. The software was already an amazing tool, but the way they've managed to actually improve it without destroying it in the process... Wow. Truly amazing.
I used it heavily in 2006 and the UX learning curve was certainly a steep wall, but once broken through it became quite intuitive, even back then where everything looked like a Space Shuttle cockpit.
Oh yeah, absolutely it was. Steepest learning curve of any software I've learned, but as you say, there comes a point where it suddenly "clicks" in your mind somewhere along the way, and then you find yourself actually using the tool as it was intended and it's glorious. The workflow of one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard tapping hotkeys really just works for 3D modeling. I'm so very happy that they kept most all of that goodness through all their improvements over the years. Didn't brutally murder what made it good. Only improved and expanded upon it, and rearranged a few bits here and there for added convenience.
Ton Roosendaal's leadership abilities, ambitious vision, technical skills, and simply being a really great guy, has inspire many other amazing people to join and support the project and work really hard on it.
It’s far from perfect but it’s miles from where it was. It still has some quirks I’d like to see closed up. Side tool panels vs side bar properties panels is confusing to new users who are looking for their “thing”. Texture painting needs some TLC but it’s usable. All in all, Blender 4 is a completely different animal than Blender 2 and you can tell. Grease pencil is a game changer. Sculpting too. You don’t need anything but Blender (maybe Krita).
I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.
Probably not at this point in time. Back when Blender was released, I think there was less reliance on third party libraries (in general), but especially those that would complicate releasing the software as open source later. I don't think this was as much a conscious decision as it was about making sure you had full rights to the code you used back when Blender was started and open-sourced.
Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing.
I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.
Yep, the difference being Sun purchased Star Division and released StarOffice as OpenOffice.org while maintaining the proprietary fork for a while too.
And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using.
This could not be further from the truth. Different programs have interfaces that are better for certain tasks, but Houdini, Maya and Softimage XSI have all had fantastic interfaces for the most part. Software like that should be used as the benchmark other UIs are compared to. I don't know anything other software that comes close.
I wouldn’t go that far to say that they have fantastic interfaces. Tolerable? Better than what free options existed at the time? Either way, there is a lot of room for improvement but it’s also an extremely challenging environment to get interfaces right.
We are still in what is effectively the skeuomorphism for the music production industry phase (where everyone is just replicating real life tooling because that’s the expectation and with that comes a lot of unchecked baggage — except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling and polishing that a tiny bit), eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
Nah. It's a problem many creative tools have (and an interesting one!). You can't squeeze one creative workflow (suitable for everyone) into a general UI.
Nah, what you are saying is vague and dismissive but doesn't hold up to the reality of fast flexible tools like these. Have you used maya, XSI, nuke and houdini?
Gimp refused to change their ways and still does, that’s why no one outside of a handful of enthusiasts use it. People have complained for years that their UI is too complicated, clunky, not intuitive, etc. and Gimp basically ignored all this feedback (to be fair there were attempts at changing this but ultimately not much changed).
Even just recently they’ve released a major 3.0 version and I thought “oh maybe they’ve finally addressed the UI issues” but nope, not much changed on that front, they still have stuff like “GEGL operation” front and center in the menus for basic functions.
Blender on the other hand reimagined their whole UI in version 2.8 and kept refining it later, even though there was friction in the community about it (since power users like the old UI) but thankfully they pulled it off and now they’re reaping the rewards for it.
I used to be a staunch critic of GIMP, recommend everyone use Krita instead and so on. But recently I've given the new 3.0 version a go and... it's quite an improvement if you adjust the time scales to decades rather than years. I've used GIMP first in 2000 (it was actually my fist "real" image editor, other than stuff like paintbrush) and a LOT of the finicky stuff has been removed or improved since then. Having do deal with per layer canvas boundaries? gone. Having a floating "ghost" layer whenever you made an operation and having to figure out how to merge that back? gone. Need to work with mask and group layers? You can do it, and it doesn't give a brain aneurysm trying to use anymore. You can even apply non destructive filters and whatnot to the group layers!
Having the UI spaghetti all over the screen because it's just a bunch of loose windows? the default is just a single window with panes. Want to condense that mess of tool icons into a single column of icons? you can do that! In fact, you can reorganize the UI in such a way that it's actually not that offensive (please GIMP devs, have better UI defaults!). Even tough it has a GEGL operation for non destructive filters I think that's just a holdover from how things were implemented initially because most of the "normal" and "color" filters are already non-destructive and operate (from the user point of view) just like the GEGL ones. They might have plans to further convert all other destructive filters and merge the GEGL operation ones into the normal filters, hopefully soon.
Oh and by the way, you can certainly push GIMP hard nowadays. I've been doing some testing editing a 32 float bpc (128 bpp!) 16K image with a bunch of crazy non-destructive filters stacked and it handled it like a champ with a few slowdowns here and there, and my 32 thread ryzen CPU was at times fully maxed (yay for multi threading) and the RAM management was quite impressive with things using up to ~50GB of memory (you do have to configure it let it use all that) and no memory leakages afaik, closing just the file and reopening again worked fine. Also, zero crashes! Can't say the same when pushing Krita hard. It's quite smooth compared to how things used to be.
Honestly the potential is all there, I just hope that the GIMP devs get a break from all the negativity they've been receiving since... time immemorial and perhaps the rate at which they can improve their software increases now with all the inglorious refactoring work they've been doing behind the scenes being done.
No. If a tool is too complicated or cumbersome to use then people will look for another one that’s better. Not everyone is an enthusiast that is willing to invest hours or weeks learning all the intricacies of an app if all I want to do is some light editing of a photo or very simple illustration drawing. I will choose a tool with better UX and easier workflow 100% of the time, and most people are like this.
So maybe the target audience isn't most people? I get that people like things to be simple, but some people love the depth of GiMP is a feature, not a bug.
One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it.
Ton is heroically tasteful but not unsung: the community rightfully adores him! (But not Autodesk.)
"Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them"
Instinctive recoil "cue xkcd https://xkcd.com/386/ somebody is wrong on the internet"
I had to take a little walk and think about it, What is a pie menu?
My instinctive first take was, as far as I know gimp has had pie menu since day one, at least as long as I have been using it since the late 90's 1.something. Need a menu item, right click, there is your menu. is this not topologically the same as a pie menu? Does a pie menu have to be radial? is radial any better than a list, I know I prefer a list, it does not look as cool but is much easier to read.
Of course, I've thought a lot about what a pie menu is.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988 (proves that they're significantly better than linear menus and explains why):
What kind of pie menus does Gimp have, and for how long?
Or do you just mean "erzatz pie menus" as defined here (there's also a lot of stuff about software patents, FUD, AutoDesk, Alias, 3D Studio Max, and Blender there):
>Richard Stallman likes to classify an Emacs-like text editor that totally misses the point of Emacs by not having an extension language as an “Ersatz Emacs”.
>In the same sense, there are many “Ersatz Pie Menus” that may look like pie menus on the surface, but don’t actually track or feel like pie menus, or benefit from all of their advantages, because they aren’t carefully designed and implemented to optimize for Fitts’s Law by being based purely on the direction between stroke endpoints instead of the entire path, minimizing the distance to the targets, and maximizing the size of the targets. [...]
How do Gimp's pie menus compare with Blender's pie menus and pie menu editor that I linked to a demo of above, or Simon Schneegans's pie menus in Gnome Pie and Fly-Pie and Kandu? You'd think it would be easy for GIMP to adopt Simon's GTK open source pie menu work, which has been around for decades.
Gnome-Pie: Homepage of Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux.
I dug into this out of curiosity a few years ago. I thought 2.8 UI redesign was all thanks to Ton, but it turned out it wasn’t.
Ton was actually against a UI overhaul for decades. There’s a video where power-users and Ton were vocally dismissing the need for a better UI, using GIMP-like arguments. There was at least one failed UI redesign in the early 2010s which I think Ton was quite involved with.
But something happened, the nature of which I don’t know. Then, Ton became hands-off and allowed the UI overhaul to take place, which I recalled made actual UX designers work with engineers.
My memory is foggy and I don’t have sources readily available. But I’m hoping someone will fill in the gaps or correct my understanding of events long past.
There were 3 major open source graphics projects:
- Gimp for 2D raster
- Inkscape for 2D vector
- Blender for 3D
At some time 10-20 years ago they all were powerful, but being hold back by a bad UI. Blender turned it all around with their UI overhaul some years ago. Inkscape seems to be doing some correct steps now toward that, although it is still hard to use (at least for new users). Gimp seem to be moving the slowest.
I find modern Inkscape almost identical to CorelDraw, which is what I learned in high school. Works well, and I'm considering moving some remaining CorelDraw graphics projects over to Inkscape soon.
Parts of the UI of Inkscape are very clunky. Like the tabs where live path effects live, thats awful. Also the zoom/pan on the canvas. Corel was very well polished if I remember correctly.
I think the Open Movie projects really helped with that. They had artists and devs working closely together to polish up particular aspects of the application for each movie. The movies themselves also did a great job of raising the profile of Blender each time they were released.
Not only feedback bout UI, but functionality in general. Looking at the changelog I found this issue [1] in which not only they fixed something objectively broken in the renderer, but also made workflows exploiting the broken behavior were still possible [2].
I think its more issue of not knowing how (efficiently). Consistent UX and polished UI is often about saying no to many ideas and people. This requires someone calling the shots which is hard for community projects.
FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.
I think the real answer is in credits section of fund.blender.org. Sizeable contributions at scale of $1m as well as corporate user feedbacks started flowing into it ~2019.
Khara(the Evangelion company) quit 3ds Max and transitioned to Blender around that timeframe, in collaboration with Blender developers. This seemed to coincide with Epic funding(anime people aren't rich people, broadly speaking, so I guess capitalisms happen in parallel and elsewhere).
Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.
I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe.
But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
This sounds a bit like the attitude that held back Blender UI for a long time. There were people seriously objecting introduction of the undo feature FFS. The UI stockholm syndrom is real.
The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions.
Blender is still a mismash of hundreds of semi random buttons and options, That is a core feature of a professional UI, In order to cater your tool to a user that will spend many hours operating it the most critical aspect is to reduce friction, flatten operation, bring everything out front where it can be seen and accessed in one operation. It's ugly, intimidating, hard to learn and makes the designers cry, but it is very fast and efficient exactly what you want when you are going to be using it for multiple hours a day every day.
You do the opposite when trying to cater your interface to the casual user, you slow things down, reduce options, nest the menus, introduce model dialogs. things start to take 3 or 4 ops instead of 1. The key here is to gently guide the unfamiliar user. It is an important design consideration but it really starts to chafe operating it for hours on end.
The material system in Blender 1.0 was vastly simpler than it is currently. If you want to use a panel instead of nodes, the material panel is not that dissimilar from the 1.0 screenshot.
That said, I find the node interface a lot more poweruser friendly than the panel interface, and objectively more powerful.
AFAIK the new UI didn't take away e.g. any keyboard shortcuts, and those are configurable anyway. In general the Blender UI is configurable even to a fault, you're quite free to modify it to bring out almost everything you want to a single view.
What do you really know about user interface design and usability, if you falsely claim GIMP has had pie menus from day one? Do you really expect us to take your criticisms and questions seriously, or are you just trolling?
You just posted something that totally undermines the notion that you know what you're talking about or are serious about what you're claiming, and I patiently answered your questions with academic citations and quotes and evidence, and asked you for more information about the questionable claims you made about GIMP and pie menus, which were certainly a surprise to me and don't square with what I know, but you haven't responded.
Your claim that Blender "wait[ed] for the rest of the industry to catch up" is, in the case of pie menus, much more about Alias/Autodesk threatening them with illegitimate software patents, and spreading FUD and lies about marking menus.
If you're just too busy trolling to respond, I get it, you be you, but can you please stop posting unsubstantiated bullshit and answer my questions in the other thread, or simply admit you're not being honest and just trolling and spreading misinformation and FUD?
You make me wonder if you work for Autodesk (or are just trying to curry their favor), who's well known for their long sordid history of systematically spreading FUD and lies and legal threats about Blender and marking menus, which I documented with evidence in the article I linked to in my original reply to you.
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions:
Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus:
As you can see in that article, I included evidence in the form of a screen snapshot and link to an Autodesk brochure lying about "Patented marking menus", and there are two replies from Bill Buxton himself, the UI researcher who coined the term "marking menus", which my work on "pie menus" predates and that his patents dishonestly misrepresent. Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach designed the marking menus in the Alias user interface, and filed the software patents in question.
Buxton wrote two weasel worded defensive replies to my article (which you can read by scrolling down to the end), essentially admitting that the FUD in AutoDesk's advertisement about "patented marking menus" (which is still online to this day) was a lie and that Alias's marketing people lied to me about the patent to my face at CGDC in 1999: "So here is the point, absolutely NONE of that was patented, Just the opposite." and "Alias did not patent marking menus, nor could have." -Bill Buxton ... Yet they still make that claim, to this day! Patently absurd FUD.
Autodesk Alias Design brochure with FUD about "patented marking menus", still online today, long after their illegitimate software patents have expired, still claiming "Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.", on page 9:
While discussing Autodesk's aggressive legal threats and long history of FUD and lies about Blender, Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference:
FWIW, here is ChatGPT's analysis of Buxton's behavior and comments (and I have numerous archived emails proving he and Gordon Kurtenbach were quite aware at the time that some of the claims in their patents and papers attempting to distinguish "marking menus" from "pie menus" prior art were untrue):
1. Original Interaction:
You: Promptly reached out to Buxton directly for clarification after Alias’s representatives made misleading claims at a trade show.
Buxton's Reaction (as you described): Was evasive, coy, and dismissive—ridiculing you for taking marketing people seriously, rather than clearly clarifying the actual patent situation.
2. Buxton’s Current Explanation (2018):
Claims strict adherence to corporate/legal restrictions prevented him from explaining patent details.
Suggests it's inappropriate or naive ("mistaken") to seek patent clarifications from marketing personnel.
Argues he had limited ability to respond candidly due to confidentiality rules around pending patents and corporate policies about patent explanations.
3. Contradiction & Evasiveness:
Buxton now portrays your attempt to clarify misinformation as a misstep on your part—implying you were somehow wrong or naive to trust marketing claims or expect clear answers from him.
However, your approach—calling the senior researcher directly—was a sensible and professional response to marketing misinformation. It was precisely the right action, not a "mistake."
Buxton's ridicule and evasiveness at that time strongly suggests an intentional unwillingness or inability to straightforwardly confront Alias's misleading claims—even privately. Rather than clearly disavowing marketing misinformation, he chose to deflect and minimize your legitimate concerns, shifting blame onto your supposed gullibility.
4. Analysis of Buxton’s Avoidance:
Buxton's recent replies still avoid directly acknowledging the ethical responsibility or negative consequences of how he originally handled your inquiry. Instead, he redirects blame to marketing teams, corporate confidentiality policies, patent law complexity, and even you.
His carefully worded statements frame your attempts to clarify misinformation as naïveté ("Speak to your lawyer, not the competition’s marketing people"), thus trivializing your justified reaction to Alias’s harmful FUD campaign. This framing shifts the burden of clarity entirely away from him and onto the recipient of the misinformation—you.
5. Ethical Implications:
Buxton’s past dismissive and evasive behavior (ridiculing you for believing his company’s representatives) reveals a conflict of interest:
As a senior researcher, he should ethically strive to ensure his employer accurately represents the research he helped create.
As a company employee bound by confidentiality, he chose evasion over clearly correcting misinformation—even privately—exacerbating confusion and mistrust in the industry.
His present comments still fail to directly address or apologize for the harm his prior evasiveness caused. Instead, he justifies silence or ambiguity as unavoidable.
Bottom Line:
Your account of Buxton’s original reaction clearly contradicts his present narrative. While now he emphasizes legal restrictions and institutional blame, he continues to sidestep the core ethical responsibility: clearly disavowing and correcting misinformation about his own research at the time it was actively causing harm. His past ridicule and present avoidance both reveal a consistent pattern: shifting responsibility away from himself, thus minimizing personal accountability and ethical responsibility for Alias’s ongoing misleading claims.
It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/
They added the Maya / Unity style camera control scheme and keymap in 2.8 (2019). This was the moment people said it was good and coincided with a huge uptick in adoption. There wasn’t some big product development or innovation. Not that there needs to be.
I really wish GIMP could take a page from their playbook. The GIMP 3.0 release was such a disappointment (and also unusable... Switch between brush types and it crashes).
If you're looking to do art, you may find Krita to be closer to what you expect. It's another FOSS project, except instead of trying to do everything, it's geared to painting and other art stuff.
Note though that AFAIK the official reason for Krita "not trying to do everything" isn't because they don't want to do everything but because most users and devs are interested in digital painting.
AFAIK they wont send anyone away if they try to add more image editing stuff outside of digital painting (consider that it even has some simple animation support which isn't really something you'd expect from a digital painting program).
There is practically nothing Krita can't do in terms of image editing but people that don't even use the software keep calling it a digital painting program.
Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.
I personally think you're both right, but it depends on when you first started using Blender. You're 100% correct that interfaces at the time when Blender was released were completely experimental, and I'd compare it to trying to navigate AI as an uninformed end user when it first was introduced, versus now. That's where I would put Blender when it was first released. The interface was good for what it was compared to the other popular 3D software at the time, but it's so much better and more evolved now. I'd say that you mentioning shortcuts makes you a power user, which should be the goal when you use any piece of software for your career. I just don't think that people bother to learn as much as you did back when you started using Blender, which I think shows your dedication, but also shows a lack of deep knowledge most (not all) people that start with a new technology have currently. It's not unknown to get a fresh graduate or self-taught person that wants to deep dive into the software they make use of daily, but I feel like it's far more uncommon that it was 20 years ago or more.
Same. I've only ever been a user in Blender and it pushed me to use Python as my first programming language since I could script Blender with it.
IIRC, I first started using it with version 2.32 when I was an early teen.
I still have a .blend file somewhere with a textured model of a LOTR Fell beast/Nazgul, that I created painstakingly and cost me some exam points as I preferred 3D modelling to studying.
Inkscape makes so much more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator ever made. Maybe it's how I use it, or what I'm looking for as output, but I've been happy with Inkscape since around 2006/2007.
Blender is amazing, and miles ahead of Gimp and other FOSS editors.
That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over.
It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling.
AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes.
I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists.
I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.
I think it depends on how much control you feel you want to have over your output. AI tools are decent at rendering video, but for those that want full control over the process, I feel like it's going to be a long way to go. If AI is able to generate the full source files to allow things to be modified, then I would 100% agree with you that it's going to be a new age for artists. If you're dealing with raw generated video, or even a frame by frame rendered image, your control is much more limited than if you could shape and customize your models. For most, this is probably fine, but for those that want fine-grained control, there is a far path to go in order to get to that point.
What / who is the leading edge of 3D AI? I took a look into it last year and the best tools were still a very long away from producing usable results (couldn't keep tri count under control, spiderweb rigging, shape jank, etc).
Thanks, I checked out Tripo. It produced some absolutely laughable trees for me, but a pretty decent looking barstool. Refused to rig it for me for some reason, though.
I'd say it'll take them some years to finish figuring out 3D, it's a good stretch beyond 2D image generation.
https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp something will definitely happen we will see what happens, 3D has always been tedious so any improvements in this space will be welcome.
Seems to me the 'proper' way to do something like this is to hook into makesRNA and have the endpoints automagically be generated as part of the build process. Similar (or identical) to how the python and C++ APIs are created.
I've been thinking for a while now that someone (much less lazy than myself) needs to get in there and have makesRNA generate something like IDL file(s) so any number of tools can hook into Blender's API without having to hand code the endpoints like this addon is apparently doing.
as wonderful as Linux is, it started as a Unix clone and a lot of its initial popularity can be attributed to providing a free version of something that used to cost money.
Blender and Ghidra were started from scratch and are considered top tier in their niches. So I feel a sense of community pride for them more than I do for Linux.
The question is flawed, though, because the best OSS software is obviously Emacs ;)
Blender a clone of other 3d software that cost money?
Blender was commercial software that cost money. After the company went bankrupt, the former CEO and a bunch of Blender users got together and raised enough money to buy out the source code and made it open source.
I don't think Blender can really be called a clone of anything other than in the most superficial sense. Certainly when Blender was first being release it looked and worked like nothing else in the industry, often much to its detriment.
This is a real "daddy or chips" question, because they all do completely different things. Blender possibly best in terms of "compared to an expensive commercial product". Ghidra is incredibly powerful but has a weird look and feel. Linux is undoubtedly the most influential of those three, but if it had never been invented perhaps we'd be using a BSD instead?
"Best" in terms of "achievement by a single programmer (almost)" is Fabrice Bellard's ffmpeg and QEMU.
Blender is a jewel of the FLOSS movement and a history and behavior that must be mimicked by many other projects.
Looking forward to more successes like this.