Chris not really 
. But basically there are fewer Maya users out there than you would think. Several reasons for this
1) Maya users are media affiliated so they will seem like a disproportionately big crowd.
2) Confirmation bias.
While the amount of active Maya licensees is probably around 10-20 thousand worldwide, there may be many more Mayas that are in disuse or in legacy use so total may be closer to 40.000*. But reality is i don't know, this is just guessing on my part. What i do know is that that's the actual ballpark figure for quite widely used CAD package. So figures presented are in correct ballpark.
Really there are not so many maya users out there. Sane business users would be on a subscription. But yes some of users still running maya 2009 (I am and i have access to any version i choose).
Cost, Mayas not actually expensive. The fact is maya used to be cheaper but still its not like poweranimator days. Look at it this way, a software that costs 10,000 is about as much as the total operating cost of one tech worker for a month or two after all other burdens**. Sure its a bit of money but really its not all that much. Also they really are priced so that you would buy the subscription. If you are a programmer then absolutely you NEED to be on subscription as you get many maya versions to compile against***.
Dont price your stuuf at 10$ thats for sure.
So total software cost about as much as 2-10 times the hardware cost to run stuff on it is reasonable to me.
- university users and bundle users.
** burdens in usa are less but so is the price of Maya.
*** just because somebody is on subscription does not mean they will upgrade.
PS: in any case i think the party is over. Maya, MAX, XSI have come close to EOL. In fact i think the entire idea of how we organize this stuff will need to be rethought in a short time.
