Maya is a coding platform with GUI. That's the reason why its the standard right now. Everything you see in Maya can be coded by you, yes every bits of UI and interface. Its very easy to extend and inyegrate into any pipeline. Nuke is the same way.
That sounds great on paper, but in reality isn't so easy. Am not sure if you fully realise and appreciate how much money and resource you need to fully develop and support your own 3d software, or how sustainable it is. A good example is Shake, the compositing software from Apple. The was pre-Nuke and everyone was using…
As others have said, software costs basically equals loose change when it comes to a medium-large studio when compared to employee costs and efficiency. And when it comes to animation, things really have to be animated in a set program or pipeline when compared to modeling which transfers relatively straightforward between…
Blender is used a lot in the industry these days for almost everything except large scale VFX. In games you can usually just request an install for your modeling app of choice, most of the time your supervisors wont care what you work in, as long as the final delivered file ends up in a maya or 3ds max file before final…