Meh, I don't think it's really that bad at all. The issue, methinks, is that everybody and his narcoleptic brother learned Photoshop
first so that any deviation from the Photoshop way of doing things seems like a step in the wrong direction.
In a similar fashion the first 3D CAD package I learned extensively was SolidWorks. It was good and I was good at using it. Later I had the opportunity to try Autodesk Inventor, a program of similar function. It was terrible! Every part about the UI and its function was all wrong. I had a tough time getting a good workflow from it since I was fighting it all the time. A colleague of mine had never used either program, but he seemed to pick up Inventor more more quickly. He wasn't drawing on prior experience and making assumptions about how to use the UI. He was just using it.
I learned The GIMP before I learned Photoshop. the GIMP works well for me and I am able to do what I need to do with it. When I use Photoshop (or Elements, more commonly) I end up fighting with the UI because things seem, to me, to be in the wrong places. No, it's not great, but it's not as bad as some make it out to be. To each his own, really.
/semi-rant
) . The guys that have been trialing Inventor for a while already have said very similar things to yourself about the UI.
