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i disagree, when you start getting into real life situations with houdini, you realise that houdini is the most technical software out there, if you think that you will do everything pushing some buttons and voila, you are in the wrong place... vex is now the bread and butter here and you know that you have to do some for and whiles here and there...

if you want to get in on houdini, forget 3d max and maya, i started on that way, and is the worst... because maya is one-button-click-solution... no no, in the kingdom of houdini you NEED TO KNOW MATH trust me, if you want to do even simple operations you need to use dot product and vectors A LOT, remember your school maths and you will be fine here ahh and you need to know programing, vex is becoming must

i dont see the problem with complex networks, the real problem is when you dont have networks at all and all is a black box...

Also, that's not to say you can't do similar things with POP Wrangles. You could write one, but you'd need to affect something like force or velocity . For instance: @force += set(0,@age*chf("mult"),0); Would add to the force each frame the age of the particle * some multiplier value. Keep in mind @force is read automatically in DOPs by the popsolver and integrated into the sim, but if you wanted to do a similar effect in SOPs using a solver SOP, you'd need to do something like accumulate your custom force to the velocity (@v) and finally apply to the point's position (@P) (Look into Euler Integration if you're interested in that).

Yeah - houdini is becoming more and more artist friendly so knowing the maths is useful but not absolutely necessary. Anything you don't know can always be googled Python is not necessary at all but again, any additional skill is useful. If I were to invest in my future from scratch I would do it with SideFX not Autodesk for sure. They are considerably more customer-centric, they listen to their user-base and you can get their software free to learn with the PLE version. There's tonnes of learning content out there with Peter Quint, entagma, Rohan Dalvi, Go Procedural, sidefx.com and here on odForce. The community is really helpful and can always get you out of a pickle. I'm an XSI convert but I'm glad autodesk canned it as it gave me the push towards this sensational piece of software.

Maya and Houdini are quite different software products. If you plan on using Houdini in the long term, I would start with Houdini, not Maya, as it will be harder to un-learn the mindset you use in Maya, when you finally move into Houdini. Studying Python is especially useful for pipelines (making sure all the files are written to the correct places for instance) Learning advanced Maths is certainly not necessary for now, as long as you know what sin, cos, tan and % do in terms of math, you can do almost anything already.

Alex Jones is an embarrassment to logical thinking. Epic, maybe, idiotic, absolutely.