It definitely makes sense.

Recently I had a need for a CAD program and rediscovered how insanely expensive commercial 3D software is for the average person.

Sure, many companies now offer monthly subscriptions, but even those subscriptions are ginormous for the amount of relative value returned. Like, do I really want to pay $220 a month for AutoCAD when I only need to design a part for a non-commercial personal project every so often? I'm sure even a lot of small companies secretly pirate such software, especially if they are relying on something like Solidworks. I really don't know how anyone affords that package.

And yes, there are sometimes free student editions of these packages, but unlike 15 years ago it's tough to get a hold of them without an email from an academic institution the company has verified.

In my case, I was looking at AutoCAD because FreeCAD is... well, pretty terrible as a n00b. From what I can tell it works very differently in many ways from standard CAD applications. It's good for converting between formats, but it's not at all intuitive and seemingly minor actions with nothing but a cube in the workspace can cause it to go into a tizzy and completely freeze.

EDIT: Ultimately I ended up using OpenSCAD.

Commercial 3D software isn't even necessarily better, though. I know I yakked on about CAD, but I have a sort of background in Animation and used Autodesk Maya for many years, which would be the closest direct competitor to Blender. Dear lord, what a disaster of a software package. Granted, I haven't used it since the 2018 edition, but it's astoundingly bad in many areas. The main reason it's so widely used is that it's established and is capable of just about anything. The downside is that, like AutoCAD, the slightest breeze can make it crash unexpectedly. Anyone smart will save their scenes in ASCII format because who knows, something might go wrong during the saving process that makes your scene unable to open when you reboot Maya, and looking through the text-version of your scene may be the only way to fix or recover anything. That's not even all of it. And Maya is also very expensive. Unless you are a student, the only way to use Maya on a hobbyist level is to pirate it.

Having switched entirely to Blender, although there's things about it that I still find unintuitive, it's a breath of fresh air having come from Maya. Unlike Maya, it's rare that anything I do will cause Blender to freeze or crash. The default viewport rendering not only looks better than Maya's "viewport 2.0" but just seems snappier.

What I don't like about Blender is that it tries to do too much IMO. Does Blender really need a video editor and to clutter up the UI with references to it? Not specifically related, but what's with the way that modifiers work? It's kind of like Maya's "history" except it's both better and worse. Unlike Maya, you can actually change the order of how modifiers are applied. But modifiers are really only good for specific things. In Maya, the history of an object is far more generalized.

But overall, I want to see Blender succeed and maybe, just maybe knock things like Maya down a peg, even if it takes another 20 years.