Well, for someone used to some other 3D cad tool, of course Blender has a steep learning curve. For someone like me who never used anything else, and has been Blendering for 2 years, Blender's controls are what comes natural. All I'm asking, really, is for controls not to be hard-wired to the app. I've just looked at the keyboard layout options, and the problem is I cannot reconfigure it for the look and feel of Blender, because the functions are not the same. Blender doesn't have a "move camera left", "move camera up"; instead you can rotate the scene with the middle mouse button pretty much as if the whole screen was a trackball, and the scene was inside it. If you middle-click on the right side of the screen and drag the mouse back, the scene rolls clockwise. You zoom with the scroll-wheel, and you can pick any object to use as the center of rotation and zoom, by right clicking on the object and pressing "." on the numeric keypad. The zoom is exponential: It slows down as you get closer to an object. And you can drag the scene up or down with shift-middle-button/drag. I'd be willing to try and program these functions, if you tip me where to go. Seriously; if you think what I'm describing is unintuitive, please realize that for people used to it, using the current types of controls is also a steep learning curve. It goes both ways.
And it's not just a matter of "learning something different" but the feeling of having to learn an "inferior" way of doing things.
Well, for myself I don't care that much, I can always use Blender, I suppose, then import the scene, and use VO just for the materials and stuff; but I'm just telling you for the good of VisualOgre's popularity, that the Blender community is huge, and ignoring their preferences would probably result in them not using this app except for materials. And this probably applies to the preferences of people who use other tools as well.
Ideally, what I think would be best is to have a set of functions that is the union of the functionalities of most 3D tools, and have a file save dialog on the keyboard and mouse options, so that people can come up with Blender emulation mode, Lightwave emulation mode, or whatever, and share the files on the internet.
