The Blender metaphor is spot on. I am a software engineer, I spent 2 years living in 3ds max in my teens, writing tutorials for it, and I am unable to make a basic scene in Blender, it’s like alien made software.
It really is bizarre. It's like a dive bar that has the bathroom doors as men's on one door with an arrow pointing right and women's on the right with an arrow pointing left. It's a case study in how not to design a UI.
The GP refered to "blender of yore". Blender went through major UI overhauls and recent versions are very intuitive.