That's a gross misrepresentation there, Calabi. A great deal of Blender's development happens in at the Foundation and all people keep in contact through IRC. Every two years, the Foundation gets a bunch of artists together in Amsterdam to make a short movie, with the programmers sitting mere meters away from the artists.…
The reason why some of the guys here keep mentioning Blender, is because you can do everything you just described in Blender, right now. Build your low-poly mesh, sculpt it out into a high-res mesh, unwrap your original low res mesh, create a texture, paint on that texture by painting directly to the 3D model in the 3D…