You are wrong, dude.
Decimation Master, Blender's Decimation modifier, and the similar Max modifier, they all SUCK. You can NOT use them for animated characters, because these totally screw up the topology.
This is what you should have:
This is what Decimate gives you:
(source:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=117040 )
You might get away with Decimated topology in something like rocks, or trees, as long as they're not animated. You also might get away with that if you pre-render everything. Games don't do that, and characters need to be animated, so you can NOT use decimate or similar stuff to get the lowpoly character.
Next, Sculptris was NOT made by Pixologic. It was made by a guy who was, obviously, really good at it, so Pixologic hired him and bought his technology and know-how.
Finally, unlike in 2D world where Photoshop is king, competition between 3D softwares is much more even. The "high end" programs would be 3DS Max and Maya are big, Rhino and Civil 3D and Revit also seem to be used, then there's Modo, and Cinema 4D... and Blender. Even Google Sketchup gets used! Sculpting programs are less divided, ZBrush can handle the highest detail but Mudbox and 3D Coat and Sculptris all get used too.
Speaking as a Blender hobbyist who is now studying 3D for games industry, I can tell you that the biggest problem in learning 3D is learning to do 3D. Learning how to use a specific program is EASY, once you know how to do 3D. If you can do amazing stuff in Blender, you can do amazing stuff in 3DS Max after a few weeks or so.
Now, given that you aren't locked in with your first choice, why is Blender a good first pick? Blender is not the biggest one around, that's true. However, Blender is FREE, and LEGAL. That is important. Why? You can FREELANCE with Blender. You can't legally do that with pirated 3DS Max or Maya or any of the other softwares. I think the Student license for Autodesk products might allow you to make a couple of freelance projects, but the number is quite limited.
There are reasons for not using Blender. They are not the ones you listed, but:
The particle system is worse than in 3DS Max. You can do amazing stuff, especially smoke and liquid, but some other stuff is hard.
You can't export and import rigs. You can export and import characters and animations between different software packages, but if you start animating in Blender, other people can't continue animating in Max or Maya.
Blender has more hotkeys. Some people don't like hotkeys.
Max and Maya have more plugins. Many of those plugins are awesome. Many are really expensive. Still, there's cool stuff even in the free ones.
And probably other stuff.
I guess that's about it.
Reasons for using Blender?
It's faster to model in Blender. This is partly down to my personal preference, but partly because of inherent differences in modeling and UI approach. Blender can do via keyboard shortcuts things that, in 3DS Max, takes almost a second. This may not sound like a lot, but these are commands for moving vertices around, and that's one of the biggest time-sinks in modeling.
The unwrapping system is better. One of my friends, proficient in both Maya and Max, begged me to teach him Blender after I showed how Blender unwraps things. It's that awesome. Simple, easy, FAST. Maya and Max can unwrap too, of course, but getting the results you get in Blender is slower. This was last year without plugins, though.
Blender is the ONLY program that can create Overgrowth characters, at the moment.
That doesn't sound like much, maybe - but remember, that's what the OP is asking for. How to MODEL, and how to put that model into the game. To do that, the model has to be unwrapped, textured (in 3D painting software, which Blender can kinda do, or in 2D, like Photoshop), and skinned and exported.
Blender does everything he wants as well or better than 3DS Max. Blender is the only way to get the character into Overgrowth.
