I came at Railworks knowing nothing about 3d modeling other than "it exists." Now, I am whipping out small assets via Blender at an increasingly feverish pace. I started by reskinning existing models to learn the flow, and then graduated to full-blown models. During all of this, I have studied the works of other Artists in detail, and I am prepared to make the following statement:
The quality of a product depends on the commitment of the Artist, not how much you payed for it.
If you are led to Payware assets for your route, the only issues revolve around which audiences it will reach. Beauty, being in the eye of the Beholder, it gets rather murky thereafter as to which is "best." A price tag has zero relationship to whether an asset works in your route or not.
Modeling takes practice and persistence, but do does building a route, or a scenario.
In the interests of full disclosure, my decision has been to go the Freeware route, mostly to avoid any, how shall one say, Imperial Entanglements...
I love the discussion of trees! In the desert mountains of the Basin and Range, you get a rock, and little else!
