>>6The original 3D Studio was an amazing piece of software.
It was originally known as Solid States 3D and it was created by a lone programmer, Tom Hudson, for the Atari over the course of a few years as a hobbyist project. Then he started to look to commercialize it, linked up with the founder and sole proprietor of an Atari software company, Gary Yost, and developed it further. They moved to DOS in 1986, as Atari was dying/dead and if you had the money, you could get high-end 24-bit professional SVGA cards for IBM PCs.
After a 1987 demo at Comdex, they caught the eye of Autodesk, which made a deal to fund it to completion--it was mostly a research and development project, Autodesk wasn't sure it would be a viable product.
They hired an additional three programmers, bringing the team to five. The first version was finally ready after an additional 24 months of work. After its success, they expanded their development team to several dozen employees working on a number of different projects for Autodesk. Autodesk then acquired them.
These day, you've got armies of code monkeys who can barely make any improvements to 3DS Max, and still manage to fuck up and release something that crashes all of the time.
My guess is that Object Oriented Programming and Design is likely to blame.