> The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.

I was with you up until this part. I was a DVD programmer for years on the de facto standard software which was very expensive and cumbersome for some people to use. Then Apple released DVD Studio Pro which did a lot of abstraction layer simplification for people, but also meant that something could not be done in that software that could be on the big boy package. I know it's an apple/orange situation, but there are times where there's a reason for the cheaper/free price tag. I haven't paid attention to the capabilities of Maya/Blender for nearly a decade, but I'm guessing there are still things that can be done in Maya that cannot be done in Blender.