Just a quick datapoint. I've used 3dsmax casually (free, academic version), and I managed to produce some images of which I was quite proud. They weren't magnificently detailed scenes, but they were photorealistic representations of the objects I was modeling. So no, it definitely doesn't take 10 years to get to the point where you can make something meaningful in 3dsmax.

It does, however, take grit, because there's a ton of documentation to read, particularly concerning rendering settings.