There is no shortcut to decent procedural generation. If you're serious about generating a lot of stuff and want to build systems go with Houdini and accept you're going to have to either learn a lot or hire someone to do the work. If you want powerful instancing, non destructive modelling and free uvs then use Max, learn…
What's state of procedural geometry creation in modern 3d packages ? Where it's more artist friendly ? I am talking not about some complex particle effects but rather typical procedural environment generation ? Starting form something as trivial as alternating wall blocks , building modules along a splines or sketch…