This is software with a learning curve. It's set up so that you can learn it and then be very productive. From the number of Linux CLI people on here, you'll find a lot of people who are sympathetic to that.
If you want a friendly UI there's always SketchUp.
Addendum having just looked at the blender "hotkey chart" you linked: That's not a hotkey chart. That's a detailed description of every command with a hotkey.
If you added similar descriptions in the AutoCAD commands list it could probably hit 100 pages.
Besides, if your finger memory hasn't picked up all of blender yet, tap spacebar for command search. As long as you remember vaguely what something's called you'll find it in there.
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.
One needed all that to learn to use the old Blender. Since the 2.5x version, it got much better. UI got reorganized, keys are remapeable, and most important of all, you can search for any operator by pressing the space bar.
It is not like vim at all. Vim is predictable and has consistency in the way keybindings work. Once you understand that escape mode exists, you 're already there. Blender is a chaos of multiple window panes, buttons and options in unpredictable places, UI messages all over, inconsistent behavior of tools, and an ever-confusing window splitting mechanism.
I write faster with vim. I doubt anyone builds faster with blender.
For box modelling and poly by poly modelling, Blender is the fastest of all applications I've tried.
Blender is weird but predictable too. For example the keys GRS (grab, rotate, scale) works in different areas (3D, UV, animation, NLA, video editor) where it makes sense (in some there's no rotation). The UI overhaul of 2.5x moved stuff in a more logical order. If you understand the concept of "data blocks" and "users", you'll understand most of Blender.
[1] http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyRefer...