[perseusmandate]

Even if Blender can't match any of these point solutions at their respective niches, I have to imagine there would be a ton of value in a team that all mostly works in a common tool they all know well a pipeline of Maya, C4D, Modo, Nuke, Houdini, Zbrush, etc strung together.

I'm just starting to learn Houdini, but with the OpenVDB support in Blender it seems like the most elegant workflow for someone without existing experience is run simulations in Houdini and then just export the volumetric data to Blender and work with it there.