As someone who had a prior career in VFX using mostly Autodesk and Adobe software, there are people who spend their whole career in one of these packages and have a lot of difficulty becoming fluent in a second one.
They are designed with completely different metaphors and workflows and yes, the end result is always pixels, but learning multiple high end creative software is nothing like learning different programming languages.
If those people ever actually put in the effort they'd find all the same tools just under different names. While it may take a while to get the nuances down at the end of the day they all do the same things. It's simply a matter of adapting your existing skill to a new workflow.
We need to compare Apples with apples here. VFX is like programming languages,while the software(Maya, SOLIDWORKS, Blender) are like IDEs ( Eclipse, Intellij). The principles behind VFX software are universal, however one should be able to get going by simply reading a decent book about the package.
As someone who had a prior career in VFX using mostly Autodesk and Adobe software, there are people who spend their whole career in one of these packages and have a lot of difficulty becoming fluent in a second one.
They are designed with completely different metaphors and workflows and yes, the end result is always pixels, but learning multiple high end creative software is nothing like learning different programming languages.