Blender; I fell in love.
I also came from Max. At the Art institute we were taught Max and I’m still confused as to why the college didn’t even show us Blender as an option…
I’m going to be honest the first time I used Blender I hated it. Kept blaming the UI and the viewport controls(which I still hate the controls(not the ui)… I use my own viewport control scheme which is a mix of Max/Blender with all Blender hotkeys ). Then realized I could customize it and started understanding the modularity of Blender and haven’t looked back since.
LOL and the first time I used the 3d cursor… lol… I was really confused as to it’s purpose. For at least a year, I just gave it the most complicated hotkey so I would never have to think about it or accidentally use it, for an entire year the cursor was just this “thing” in the center of the viewport which signified only 0,0,0. Until I kept seeing online why people were using it and then slowly started using it and when I finally understood it, I can’t get over how useful it is.
Don’t fear the cursor, embrace it. It is an arbitrary, extra origin or destination point in space. You can use it to assign a new manipulation origin for an object, you can use it as a pivot point, as an object creation point, as a snap point. You can easily place it on the surface of an object, at the center or even at the center of any 2 or more points(objects, vertices, edges, faces)
For me it’s not only about the fact Blender’s free, but it’s genuinely a professional and serious developer tool.
In my opinion, I feel like Blender’s UI is amazing despite what many people say. Basically Blender is itself a direct Interface to your creations not just the menus. It feels much more like playing a game… obviously it’s not completely there yet and has lots of room for improvement, which is another of it’s other powerful sides: improvement.
The animations tools are amazing. I really like the UV editing in Blender(I have no clue how it is in Maya) I actually prefer sculpting in Blender and equally use it for all retopo and normal baking. The grease pencil is very useful for modeling and creating curves.
Contours retopology by CGcookie is great(paid plugin), Decimate and/or Remesh get the job done if you know how to use them. Blender has a multiresolution modifer(which is like zbrush’s subdivision levels). F2(the plugin) is really useful. Many, many useful plugins from the community…
…like Bsurfaces… 
, it might seem awkward to use at first but it’s so powerful… I don’t understand why it’s not praised all over the internet. Although, it lacks documentation and the video for it… is well… I find the background music er… painful
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.64/Bsurfaces_1.5
As for performance I guess it depends on your system… For me Blender runs very smooth even on my crappy 7year old so its easy to work on my beast and then use blender on the go(just not for rendering lol).
It doesn’t look like you will have either fluids nor MEL scripting in Maya Lt, so it’s really a matter of tool preference and FBX convenience only. Asset creation is the real priority with your 3d tool so choose wisely based on what you create better in, not what offers the best FBX options.(which blender is getting better with despite the blender developers having to create workarounds) Autodesk is the real problem with FBX.
I’m still confused as to why Epic depend on it so much even though Maya/Max are the tools they use in-house, but that will change(ex. now added .obj support). It makes absolutely no sense as a multi-purpose, multi-platform and multi-user oriented game engine to depend so uniquely on a single proprietary format.
Anyway, you should try both Maya and Blender and find which one suits you better, which one do you feel more comfortable creating in.