Think of Maya more like a standard than an application. It's a front end that people are already used to looking at, even though they might be using it to drive a different "truck" on the back end. If you don't like working within the Maya or Max environment, imagine what it was like working in a completely proprietary environment developed by your RnD department who was more interested in making cool effects possible than smoothing out the GUI and user experience!
With a DCC application, you *have* to invest in the user experience because you need to sell as many seats as possible. With a custom RnD effort inside your studio, you don't care as much about user experience because you have a captive "market" who is facing the choice of "do it my way" if you even want to have a remote chance of doing it at all. It doesn't matter if the XSI experience is nicer for some of us. It doesn't matter if XSI's core is more mature or potentially easier to develop for functionality like ICE. At the end of the day, the larger market base has built their own "trucks" and is using Maya to drive them, and they might be starting to champ at the bit a little as their "trucks" are needing more modern controls. XSI is not an option to them, it's not even on the radar. The real threat is their fear of ADSK, and the potential that they re-wire their trucks without dependence on any DCC app. Meanwhile, for the rest of us who don't have our own RnD departments, XSI is great because something like ICE does empower non-programmers to do things we couldn't do otherwise. So at least we have a fighting chance. Compare the workability of a custom tool made by someone who only writes code all day, versus a custom tool developed by the user in the context of the usage. There is still a huge value to that, and should (hopefully) continue to be a market for that. -Bradley On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Stefan Kubicek <s...@tidbit-images.com>wrote: > Fair enough and agreed on, but why would Maya be a better candidate to be > developed in that direction than any other app? > > >
