Blender's improvements aren't limited to 2.28 (Score 3, Informative)

There's been efforts to improve documentation, most notably the release of the still-slightly-under-construction 2.0 manual online (so no, they're not deliberately designing a hard-to-use program with the intent to make money on manuals). The shortcomings of the renderer are being addressed by exports to POV-Ray, Renderman-compliant programs such as 3Delight, and, (most interestingly in my opinion), Yafray. Check out this gallery--probably 90% of the scenes were exported from Blender. Right now, this is done via a plugin, but the unofficial/experimental builds are starting to have rudimentary raytracer exports built in.

Altogether, I think that Blender is a very attractive choice for the 3D hobbyist--someone who enjoys 3D and graphics but is never going to make a living from it. After all, why shell out $1000+ when a little extra effort can get 95% of the features for free? If you plan to have a career in 3D, or have lots of money, it's probably worth it, but as one who's just in it for the fun, the eye candy, and the challenge of making things work, open source offers me four very decent tools to use together: Blender, Wings3D, Yafray, and The Gimp. All of these work to some degree on Windows, Mac, and Linux, sometimes more. There's never been a better time to get into 3D. And aspiring graphic artists shouldn't turn up their noses at such free tools either. Although you could be more immediately useful to a studio by knowing Maya/Max/Softimage/etc, simply using 3D and graphics programs of any kind will teach you tons that can easily extend to whatever programs you use later.