Just thought I’d give a short update.
Unfortunately, due to circumstances, I still haven’t been able to give these tools a try yet. I have however activated the modo trial (it’s a 30 day trial now), and I’m gonna try and use it this coming week (even if it’s just an hour at night before bed) before it expires. Don’t make the same mistake as me though. I downloaded the tool and activated trial and had a day set aside to use it… only to realise there was about 5gb of more content to download. I’m not sure how essential these packs are, but I didn’t want to risk it and get a bad first impression. So I lost my test day.
What I did do however just now was to watch the first part of the modo introduction tutorial. If you are in the same situation as me, I highly recommend giving it a look. It’s 32 minutes long and can be found here:
https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/tv/watch/series/77/54153065/
And I have to say, wow. Everything he says and does just makes so much sense. The UI is simple and logical and powerful. Keyboard shortcuts are used, but it’s the right type and amount of shortcuts. Even though I haven’t actually used the tool, I feel like I’m more proficient in this tool already than I was in Blender. Keeping in mind that it is of course easy to make things look quick and simple when you know exactly what you are doing, but still. The idea behind everything he did and said just seemed to make perfect sense to me.
In other words, unless I find working in this tool to be cumbersome for some reason, I’m pretty confident this is the tool I’ll be buying/leasing. I’m sure for what little I’ll be doing, I could probably manage in any of the free tools as well, but I don’t mind paying a little bit for good software (even if it might be a bit overkill for my purposes) if it makes it more enjoyable for me to work with during my precious spare time.
This update might seem a it premature, but I might not remember to update this thread and thought I should at least share that link with anyone else in a similar situation.