How do i get into 3D Modeling?

Blenders apparently had some huge improvements, but I hate the UI and the way it pretty much forces you to use hotkeys (it seems they have a hate-boner for shelfs and useful buttons), speaking as someone coming from Autodesk software (Maya/3DSMAX). if you got no money and wanna keep things super legal, blenders the most popular and supported one to go for, but if you want to work with "industry standard" tools Autodesk is pretty much the only choice.