I totally agree with the large quote you found on the internet.
The “few users but large fees” system was made for the automakers who didn’t even tried to lower their cost having a “the more expensive must be the better” attitude. Their selling approach was aiming at a IT Vice President or Industry Vice President who never ever used a 3D software. When those were in college Autocad didn’t even existed !
But this “closed” system is a vicious circle : few users, so no user forums, no tutorials made by expert users, and, as it is pointed out, few courses possibilities and poor ones.
My company bought Alias seats years ago.
The learning curve is very step.
The software is bloated because new functionalities were just added randomly, never “cleaning” the old versions. A new round tool was added but the old one stayed there because none of them worked properly so you are just left with trying both of them hopping it will work. Instead of putting the effort to have just one but actually working.
The rendering is also a pain in the ass. The animation menu as been right in the middle for years but it isn’t until last year that it was able to actually output some anim. Before there were just tenths or hundreds of stills for you to assemble in another software ! Even free 3D software was able to directly ouput real animation !
But this complexity itself makes you reluctant to change. “I don’t want to go through this again” attitude (which I totally understand ) allow them to grab the money year after year.
I have to say that Autodesk (I don’t work for them) seems to be doing what should have been done during all those years : rewriting the existing tools so they are reliable instead of adding fancy unfinished features to old unfinished features. For example the data translator is better, the overall stability, the auto-save when it crashes. Yes at 50 000 $ it crashes like Photoshop on your Performa 475 last century !!
It still as a long way to go before being fully cleaned up.
The new 3 versions with still extravagant price difference based on a few differences creates absurd situations : the former Studio (around 20k) user become a Surface user (around 20k, ok) but looses the sketching features ! The advice is “just keep your Studio 2009 for sketching and switch from one to the other”. Can you believe it ?
The 2010 data translator they’re so proud of : I had a CAD file which opened with problems using DirectConnect 2009. I tried 2010 : “Because of problems the file can’t be opened” I would rather have a “dirty” file than no file at all ! I switched back to 2009.
Happily Rhino is pushing ADSK, AliasWavefront had no real exact competitor. I hope a third one (Modo ? SolidWorks ?) will become a tool of choice for designers so we have a balanced competitive situation here. Catia for designers seems nice but they have the same flaws : very expensive, almost no users, not even a demo to try it !
This “closed” approach as proven to be wrong. 3DSMax was the most copied 3d soft. And became the most used, because pirate students become paying customers.