Maya is standard because the CGI industry was built around Maya and XSI.
It used to cost way more than those $3.000, hardware to run it used to cost above $100.000…
Autodesk than bought Alias at first to kill Maya and make 3DS Max the king, but it failed somthen they got XSI and killed it, companies dependent on Maya forced Autodesk to keep the program and rebuild the core engine used by it, but still the updates from release to release are minimal.
I can’t stand Blender because my brain is too much used to the workflow in Maya already. And I don’t even work with it professionally, I don’t use it everyday… If you ask than ppl using it everyday I guess none would like to move to Blender.