I always felt these big boys were not invented for the creative artist, they are rather technical and not really intuitive to work with. I know it's personal what tools you like or dislike, and I know most game studio's use these programs quite satisfactory. I also know the bigger game companies have their programmers writing tools on top of them to make them more suitable for specific tasks.

In the creation process we use quite a lot of ( self written ) tools and software, but one piece of software is indispensable for me, Silo 3D. This program is just created for modeling, nothing more, nothing less. But it's task limitation made it possible, for the developers, to concentrate and optimize it for modeling alone, in a really intuitive way. When I used it for the first time the good old art classes came back, a bunch of clay on the table and just start. Working in Silo 3d just feels the same, in my opinion every 3d artist should give it a try. The exporters of Solo are decently enough to hook up to any program, when the modeling part is done.

I don't say Silo can replace programs like Maya, but for the modeling part I can't think of anything better, more efficient. You can download a demo of the software from the Never Center website.