I am installing the software, the unreal engine itself requires 13gb of space and now it is asking me to install Xcode to be able to use it a this is an another 12gb. Is amazing to think how much you can do with blender, a 800mb piece of software. Instant uses 2.5gb of space. This must be all the libraries and graphics that Blender never comes with.
Blender has very few function compare to the other programs ,like I am comparing GIMP to Photoshop.
No doubt Photoshop is better than GIMP a lot but it comes with the prices of long startup and memory task.
GIMP has few functions but I dare say that it has every functions that need to exists, this is also applied to Blender.
Blender is very fast at startup and operating ,unlike 3d Max or Maya, it tooks minute to start up but this may had been improved because I did not use them for almost 20 years.
Well, I do not agree, that Blender has less function than say Maya, Z-Brush, Unreal Engine, etc. But I have heard, that Blender optimizes their code and also, that they clean up old code, that is no longer being used. Some of the other softwares apparently doesn't do that, so they get larger and larger.
This will probably not be the only thing that makes them so 'clunky', but I do not know enough to tell you what exactly makes Blender so small in size, considering what it can do.
Yeah I agree that Blender is pure magic in a way, given the fact that a small open source team can accomplish this. I guess it's the same story as always, a corporate machinery is just too big, incentives don't align with what their users want, so something like the Blender Institute which is community driven, can avoid getting lost on corporate red tape and just junction more efficiently.
Blender Foundation strive for small download so that more people can use it. This comes at a cost. Like no default assets library, and the removal of community add-ons. The add-ons are now apart of the extension platform. Along with themes and future plan is to have assets too. Also blender devs remove old code which can break backwards compatibility sometimes, but keeps blender from bloating.