> I'll add that Blender is my favorite FOSS project.

It couldn't be any other way. Even when you ignore the fact that it is free, Blender is literally a better modeling platform than 90% of the commercial alternatives that charge in the hundreds to thousands of dollars for their products.

My favorite thing about the project is the amazing turn about that they did with the UI about 10 years ago (or whenever that was, probably longer). They turned a complete disaster of an interface into a shining example to follow, and that's about when they won everyone's hearts and minds and basically took off in popularity.

For a program that does basically everything, the entire thing is one consistent, intuitive, user experience from beginning to end. I can't think of any other FOSS projects with this level of polish, and very few commercial ones.

I've only followed from a distance, but yes I think this too.

It's way more impressive to turn a project around, than have it good at the quality in question the whole time.

Path dependency? Not today, daemon!