I’m not here to argue & you’ve got some good points. I am defending no one; this isn’t a situation where I’m in the “hail corporate” camp.
The minute Plex started taking money back in 2012, anyone who thought Plex was still creating this product+service out of the goodness of their hearts has been missing the point. The writing has been on the wall for 10+ years.
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.