I have a love-hate relationship with Maya. At the moment, it's leaning towards the latter.

• Maya "Unlimited" is actually the *limited* version of Maya
• "Unlimited" doesn't support Fluids, but it's in the help file, leading you on a wild goose chase (related to the next bullet)
  
• Explosions are not simple
  
• Come on - isn't this a high demand item? Shouldn't there be a brush or particle emitter for this?
• Why are there no tutorials for this that are simple? I don't want a friggin' photorealistic effect, I'm not doing Final Fantasy; is a simple fireball too much to ask for?
  
• How about an explanation of why each step is important, so the explosion can be modified as desired? I'm not some idiot script kiddie - I want to know what I'm doing!
  
• When I say I want 6000 particles a second, shouldn't that tell you that I want a dense sphere of particles, rather than a bunch of little individual grains?
• Maya is too stupid to warn you when you're software rendering a hardware-only object (related to the previous bullet)
  
• Maya doesn't scale particle emissions well, nor does it parent particle emitters to NURBS in an intuitive way (related to the previous bullet)
  
• All the *good* tutorials on Alias/Wavefront are for *Silver* members. I don't want to pay $20/month because you can't write a decent manual! (sorta related to the previous bullet)
  

On the plus side, everything else is going well. Mostly. Although I seem to be in one of my "why must everyone be so friggin' DENSE?!" moods at the moment ...