I've been seriously considering moving over to blender in the last few months. I love maya and know it pretty well but blender is free, and I love free I don't like the way it's set up thought, that's it's biggest flaw that I've found so far. Haven't been able to model anything in it yet. I stopped at maya 2009, the updates are useless to me and I've been happy with 2009's features and it runs great on my computer. Well great as in as-good-as-maya-gets.