3d modeling is not a consumer activity. You can start a Blender tutorial and start putting cubes or spheres together in an hour, or you could make 3d animated movies of the same quality as any major animation studio.
The complexity involved is not a mistake, it is inherent to the artform. Blender does a fine job of layering the tools and UI so that as you need more complicated features they are there for you.
I'm not so very sure about that; before TrueSpace (or Caligari going back to the Amiga) was mangled to look and act like everything else on the market (the move that killed it, as far as I can tell, since it coincided with its decline), it was both immensely more intuitive and more dimensionally accurate when necessary than anything I've used since. No, it wasn't Crayola simple, but it doesn't have to be nearly as hard as Blender either.
The complexity involved is not a mistake, it is inherent to the artform. Blender does a fine job of layering the tools and UI so that as you need more complicated features they are there for you.