Well, I guess you’ve never worked with Blender =) There are things it can do which Maya still can’t. For example if you bake normal map using midpoly (highpoly > midpoly > lowpoly) you just can’t do it in Maya (or Modo) because it doesn’t bake applied normal maps from mid- to lowpoly (Blender does). Blender has cage baking where you can adjust cage extrusion per vertex and bake directions per vertex, where Maya just has a uniform cage extrusion. In fact there’s a plugin for Blender which will soon allow to create baking “sets” so you can save your settings individually for your high- and lowpoly sets of meshes if you split your mesh for baking. Like 3dsMax does you know.
And you also have sculpting tools with adaptive subdivisions (subdivides and cleans up your mesh as you sculpt and adds details where you need it) and a nice set painting tools in Blender.
But, to be fair and not start an app war I’ll mention a thing where Blender sucks =) It has no normal map bake antialiasing. It can bake lots of other maps, with antialiasing. But not norma maps. Yeah, that’s dumb and Blender developers don’t bother fixing it for ages. So you need to bake your normal maps twice the size and scale it down to get some kind of “antialiasing”. It’s not terrible but still so lame…
About Modo. Well, it’s good for modelling, it has nice sculpting (no adaptive topology) and painting tools, it has a superb render engine. And very poverful viewports. For non-skeletal objects. As soon as you add deformers (joints and weighted geo) the viewport dies to 5-7 fps. And I’m not talking about characters like Ceasar (the ape, you know) =) You just can’t animate characters with more than 10-20K polys. Even if you turn off subdivisions. Even if you have (like I do) a GTS680 GPU, a decent HDD and 24 gigs of fast RAM. As you would expect – in Blender you can not only animate such characters, but even turn on subdivs on it and still have your max fps.
This is all from my own experience working as a cg-artist in a mid-sized advertising studio (8 cg-artists and designers), not just quotes from forums. Blender is much more mature than most people think, there’s just not enough promotion from the devs and community (which is another dumb thing).
So, there’s no reason to use Modo or even Maya LT instead of Blender. At least try Blender yourself. It’s a bit different in the way it works, compared to Maya or Modo, but you get used to it quickly =)
Cheers,
Anton.