I think the toughest part about Alias (and almost any professional software for that matter) is that there are a LOT of different ways to accomplish the same thing. So even with a crappy UI, there are still best practices that are fundamental to the creation of 3D geometry that can’t be expressed simply.
Those things you learn over the course of learning a program, but I can’t tell you how many times I figured out to do something and used that technique until I found out later there was a way that was 50% easier to do it.
Once you learn those best practices though, the tool can become a beast.