I use Blender myself. The interface may be complex, but it has nothing on tools like Maya's interfaces. My best advice would be "suck it in and learn Blender, you won't regret it."

Wings3D is another free modeler that's used a lot around here.

Basically every 3d program you can use is over-complex and it becomes worser the older they are, the moar features creep in (3dsmax and your kilometer long pluginbeard) ... if you want to do this right, there is no staying simple, because limiting your toolset will limit your abilitys (or slow you down so much it nearly comes to the same result)

My advice- start slow, just searching for the basic stuff you know (its vertex-editing) and acquire advabilitys later over time. Look always which part of your work takes the most time and advance there. Remember, your work-flow now may take more time (oh, the joy creating) then would the little hours of reading in(oh, the drain learning) and doing the same thing with advanced work processes.

Or use Wings3D to make the model and animate it in other Programm

Use POVray and do it all in code

Yeah, sure, why start mountain climbing on small mountains, if you can travell to mount everrest and phail bigtime. Srsly, do we give advice here, or do we just troll on first sight?

Oh, wait its the spring board - i take that back.