Blender is the choice for me since it develops so incredibly fast with its fast paced development cycle, the fast bugfixing and there are so many tutorials and helpful people out there.
I already paid a few Blender projects/plugins/scripts, donating to the dev fund from time to time, the DVD purchases, their Blender cloud subscription for new tutorials and so on.
I Like to pay developers directly for improving and adding good stuff to Blender.
Tools like ZBrush, 3Dcoat, Marmoset and a bunch of other paid tools are also under my toolbelt because they are great and are companying Blender in areas where it can make the creation of 3D easier.
I transitioned from Max to Blender and never looked back to Max.
Maya also even with a lot of tries and bought books never was a real option for me, it is slow and had on my PC a lot of bugs and crashes and the student version forbids the user to make any money with it. sorry Autodesk but I want to earn money with 3D right now not in a later time when I have enough to use the “rich kids” tools.
to be fair with Blender
In some cases like bending the Vertex Normals for trees and so on, Blender lacked or still lacks but it allows me to earn money in the area that I like.
on the other side Blender now has even options to change the swizzle for Normals (X-+ Y-+ Z-+) to make it workable in many engines.
as always testing the tools and being open for new things, keeping an open eye on tools like the fast developing Blender is a good route to take. 