Yup, Blender is free and indeed notoriously hard to learn. You might want to check out some of the free learning versions of commercial apps instead. Yes there's that bastard watermark on top of your renders, but at least you're learning something that might help your career along.
Free apps can be nice though, gotta love Wings3d, Metasequoia and the tons of free rendering apps out there. So even if you eat noodles every day, you *can* learn 3D :-)