I purchased Milkshape about two and a half years ago. I quickly found its limits, but it is nice for simple stuff. Looking through the Milshape art forums, I have no idea how those people create those models with Milkshape. I find the selection tools just horrible. Milkshape 2.0 is still vapourware, so I'm not hanging out for that.

So I decided to give Blender a try. I'm working through the tutorials, and yes the interface is very non-standard. This makes learning it quite difficult. It's a pity that the exporters are written in Python, because that means that I will have to use one of the existing exporters to get it into my game, but I am thinking of writing my own file format. For that I would need an exporter (not possible since I don't know Python) or a converter from another format such as .x or .3ds.

Very often I have been tempted to write my own modeller, and I had even started on one a while back. But I do not think my skills are quite up there enough to make my own modeller usable.