Everything about the program is difficult. The interface looks like a NASA control panel. The menu structure is labyrinthine. Click on one selection and a submenu of ten further choices appears. Click on one of these and a further submenu appears with even more selections.
Dialog boxes offer mind-numbing arrays and numerical values are set to five decimal places.
It takes months to learn where features are located, much less how to use them. Even when, through dogged persistence, one masters the technical difficulties and seemingly endless logical peculiarities of the package, there still remain the equally challenging conceptual aspects. Softimage makes no attempt to ease the artist into its conceptual underpinnings. The principles underlying true spline modeling and its surfacing and animation are subtle and far outside the student's normal experience. You either understand these difficult ideas or you do not.