To me, the really impressive thing about Blender is that it now has a pretty good UI. I'm pretty snobby about the GUI apps I install, and Blender is probably the only professional-level (as in professional users) open source tool that feels pretty good to use on a Mac. In the early days it was pretty rough, but it's rare to see open source software UI consistently improve like this.

On aesthetics, it definitely beats out Lightroom Classic, which is a closed-source paid tool (sidenote: I really miss Aperture).