Matt, I get this all the time. An app has massive potential, I spend ages learning then a major stumbling block arrives. It didn't take me 13 hours to learn Blender. I've been working for weeks on it and on and off for years. It just took me thirteen hours to find the two stumbling blocks. One of which is a new change. I've noted on the development forum that removing part of the Blender Cycles procedural power is a crazy regression but who knows what they will do. Interesting that I find hardly anyone complaining about this. On
Blenderartists.org most people even didn't seem to know that I was on about. I had to provide screenshots to show it. This is hard core Blender users and I was describing how the app works.
I find this kind of thing crops up a lot with open source software. They strip something out that if it was a commercial app they'd lose serious money. It would be like if Planetside removed the GI or something and brought it back next year. I'm not actually ditching Blender because it does do a few interesting things. It has a compositor which seems to work OK. It has various interesting ways of turning mesh to bitmapping textures and vice versa. The new dynamic topology is in fact very cool but doesn't interest me a huge amount. I prefer 3D Coat's voxel sculpting. The new renderer is very cool. Very nice results but then If I'm going to use Modo that doesn't really matter.
Wings3d is one app I learn't that I can totally stand by. Great modeller. Whatever I said about I don't take back.
I haven't used Modo in a while. I see a lot of features I didn't know it. had. I thought it lacked procedural texturing. It used to. Not now!
As for learning Modo. This won't be a few days that's for sure. For a laugh, here's the gradient editor:
http://docs.luxology.com/modo/701/help/pages/modointerface/viewports/GradientEditor.html