That’s not any faster than what you would do in 3ds , it takes the same amount of actions–in 3ds the transform values are visible on the bottom of the screen, just double click to select and then type it in.
I just downloaded blender to check it out and here’s a few things I’ve noticed:
-Lack of selection options, 3ds has vertex, edge, border, poly, and element.
-Shift+translate to make a copy
-3ds has Reference copy type where it keeps all changes that the original has but you can add changes to it that don’t apply to the original
-3ds has modifier stack–make non destructive changes, and changes on the bottom go all the way to the top
-right-click spinner to make value 0
-Shortcuts aren’t consistent in different modes–for instance, object mode W is translate, E is rotate, R is scale, when I go to Edit mode, E is now extrude
-actually, a ton of unintuitive keyboard shortcuts, though I assume that can be adjusted
That’s just spending a little bit of time with it, the lack of a system like modifiers is probably the biggest difference
It’s not to say that Blender is a bad choice–you should just be more careful about fanboy comments. Ultimately you want to feel like you’re OK using a free program, and that you don’t have to spend money to do what you need to. And for people using Maya/3ds it comes down to wanting to be sure that spending thousands of dollars is worth it.
It’s probably not worth the thousands of dollars considering what Blender can do for free, and Modo can do for less than half the cost (and much better licensing/upgrade systems), but if 3ds were free, I’d still use it over Blender.