They kinda did go mainstream but they didn't last long because they were fucking awful. And software like Zbrush came along and made them kinda unnecessary.
Also people just get good with a mouse. Ultimately no one wants to replace small movements with a mouse with large hand movements which become uncomfortable pretty quickly.
I must be a slow learner then, I've been using mice for at least 20 and I still suck at it. Yay lack of coordination!
Currently mostly using Solid Edge (parametric 3d cad), but as I move towards more 3d printing stuff (designing/building a uv resin printer just now :D ) I'll likely be using stuff like blender more. I've played a little with blender and quickly realised I need to learn a lot more about the design process - so different to parametric modelling.
I've also played a fair bit with mudbox (I think that's what it's called) which is fun as hell and would be amazing with one of those 3d haptic pen things.
Also also I've been playing with using a laser line and offset camera to make point clouds of real objects and turn them into meshes. No idea what the best software to manipulate and edit the meshes is, probably blender again. I bough a broken kinect and fixed it up to try making 3d scans but it was really fucking hard to get a reliable scan with it.
I read somewhere about a library for Blender that can create meshes from photos (several from different angles, like). It's early days but when they nail that tech it'll be amazing.
Autodesk have an free android app that does that, it's pretty cool but still not perfect (obviously). The processing is all done on their server farm and it still takes bloody ages.
Oh. what user name? Since joining Stream I have occasionally gotten friend requests from unknown persons for unknown reasons which I don't accept because I don't wish to fraternize with russian mafia. I will of course accept yours.