Never see this topic before. So sorry for answering lately.
About using blueprints in Blender, I wrote some times ago a tutorial about it :
Pixels or Atoms ?
Definitely, Maya and 3DS Max are NOT free software. Blender is free, both as free beer and as free speech. There is a large community about it. See
blender.org - Home and
BlenderNation as starting points.
Here in SMCars, there are a few regular Blender users. I'm one
So you can get some feedback for sure.
About a GeForce4MX, I used it (one integrated on mainboard) for many years, it's pretty enough to display some thousands of polys in Blender interface. As CG card is NEVER used for rendering, it's not a big problem.