As a free open source project blender is always going to be playing catch-up with Maya selling 1K+ licences unless the development is severely mismanaged.
Depends by what you mean by catchup? Complete feature parity hardly is the goal of Blender project so I’m not sure how to figure out what exactly constitutes the feature disparity that should be caught up by blender.
One view to look at it is that polygon based modeling, animation and material authoring can be done using a finite feature set, and once that feature set is complete, further enhancements are nice to have, but not critical.
> One view to look at it is that polygon based modeling, animation and material authoring can be done using a finite feature set, and once that feature set is complete, further enhancements are nice to have, but not critical.
This is definitely true, if the interface is refined. In this respect, blender doesn't just not hit the bullseye, it's as if someone held the arrow and shot the bow straight in the air.
