I know this is an old post but I just can't stand such gibberish
Software used has nothing to do with the quality of animation, textures and to some extent lighting even (you can fuck up lighting in Blender too). The only reason some animations are better and some are worse is because different artists spend different amount of time working on single animations,some will do more animations but the quality of animation might be worse, some will put in more effort but this will result in less animations, obviously they make it for money and fans want content, so most favor simpler animations over complex ones to release more videos, they still deliver quality video due to high quality of models, textures, lighting but animations may be done simpler.
It literally does though. You can't make something as good as a Blender animation in Gmod because Gmod, and the source engine version it uses, doesn't have the same sort of tools as blender does since it was never made to do it.
Software absolutely has EVERYTHING to do with the quality of animation, because if software doesn't have X,Y, or Z, tool to do something, you wont have the same quality as if made in software that does. Obviously you can fuck up things in Blender(no one ever said otherwise so this whole comment is a strawman from the get go),, but Blender easily allows for much higher quality animations compared to SFM because it was made for it, and has tools to do it SFM doesn't.
Personally I don't like work of some of those Blender artists, a lot of of their animations are quite boring and simple indeed, but I never liked Studio FOWs animations that much either, they aren't bad and they do have a lot going on but quite often because it was done in SFM the animations seem rough, unfinished, most Blender artists have better control over animtion in it so theirs usually fees more fluid and realistic. Still there are some amazing guys that animate really well in both Blender and in SFM, some guys even manage to make SFM look good (rare but happens).
Textures can look good in SFM, it's down to models.
Blender is not a resource hog, it's a 3D package that does path tracing which is demanding and takes time, SFM is a game engine tool based on ancient video game engine, obviously it runs fast. Also Blender now has Eevee real time engine that far exceeds SFM's Source Engine capabilities and delivers high quality while taking a fraction of the time needed compared to Path tracing renderer.
this part of your posts just contradicts your first part
>software doesn't matter!
>but because other artists used blender which had all these extra control their videos look better
So software does matter?
I haven't posted here in a long time but this post was so dumb, and contradictory, it made me.