Well, with the begining of a new semester in college (goddamn it, this one is going to be BUSY) I have new classes, one of which is a animation class that uses Autodesk Maya. Prior to this class, the only autodesk program I had used specifically for modeling and animation was 3-Ds Max, and I was less than impressed with it's performance. In fact, I was downright pissed with the extremely crappy nature of it's performance. Using it was like trying to draw a picture with a one pound block of coal; extraordinarily cumbersome and uniquely pissy about anything that seemed remotely out of order. Using Maya is like having the same picture to draw, just now your block of coal is about 3 times as large and 10 times as pissy and will probably fail in the manner of a fire-y burn-y death if you do anything to anger the great animation gods. In fact, it will also fail in an extraordinarily annoying and difficult to diagnose manner (particles not appearing, meshes violently disagreeing with your edicts, etc.) if you even slightly annoy the great animation gods.
In blender, if something fails, then the code behind it probably hasn't been written yet, or was written poorly one time. If something gets reported in by a large number of users then the open-source community finds the problem at the heart of te problem, re-builds the functions and then tests.
In Maya, if something fails, then the code behind it was probably written with a broken spoon and tested by a bunch of monkeys randomly typing away on e-macs. If something gets reported in by a large number of users then Autodesk, rather than trying to find the root problem they slap a quick patch on it, pray that it won't break and ship it out without having fixed the root problems, and only further complicating the mess that is the source code.