It seems the post is talking about "upgrade satisfaction" and as such it is not surprising that the newest three modeling apps are on the top of the list blender, houdini, and modo.

I have use all three and although they do have innovative poly modeling features and workflows, some of which I would like to see brought into Maya, I find it hard to switch gears from my Maya workflow.

I don't model enough to learn more then one application workflow. There was a time I resolved to ditch Maya and switch to modo after watching some very compelling Modo poly / subd modeling tutorials.

In the end I ended up being frustrated by all the modo crashes. I ended up being a mediocre modo modeler and my Maya skills declined as well.

So in the end I guess I'd rather know one package inside and out and be a halfway decent modeler then have a half assed understanding of multiple packages and suck at them all!

I am holding out hope that autodesk does not kill maya. I find 3ds clunky and the user interface is a total cluster f..k. To me it's modifiers are like word 2007, which hides all the tools under 500 ribbon tabs. It's like a freaking easter egg hunt every time I want to do something. Although the stack, like the modo tool pipe is nice.

Maya's user interface has everything I need neatly arranged. However, some tools are in dire need of updating or quite frankly just removing.

I used to be a 100% nurbs surface modeler. The maya surfacing tools were always a bit touchy and if you every used studio tools you got the distinct impression that all the maya nurbs tools were just version .00000001 of experimental trial versions of the studio tool equivalents. Eventually autodesk needs to fix a lot of the nurbs tools. But I'd understand and would appreciate if they would focus on the poly/subd tools for now.