That link. Wow. Kudos to the guy for perfecting his art. I love the end result and I love those kind of engineering cutaways in general.
If coming new to the game, I feel that using Blender to make it in 3D would give you reusable parts that could be resized, coloured and posed from any angle. Allowing the next "similar engineering object" to be made much faster.
But for someone who has already so clearly mastered their process I suspect that the time taken to master Blender and the frustations involved would detract too much from the joy of their work.
I've done both Blender and GIMP-only methods and TBH the GIMP method is nice in that you are stuck with one camera shot decided in advance. Eventually in full 3D I start fiddling with camera angles think about all the animation possibilities and it's downhill from there, time-wise. :-)
Though I have also found that it's sometimes nice to block things out with Blender so that the camera perspective is easy to work out quickly and the main shape lines are all blocked in...
If coming new to the game, I feel that using Blender to make it in 3D would give you reusable parts that could be resized, coloured and posed from any angle. Allowing the next "similar engineering object" to be made much faster.
But for someone who has already so clearly mastered their process I suspect that the time taken to master Blender and the frustations involved would detract too much from the joy of their work.