To be honest, I don’t think that I recall all of the reasons that I settled on either Panda or Blender–although I’m pretty confident that in both cases one significant element was that they were both entirely free (well, more or less so in Panda’s case–there are issues such as use of FMod to watch out for, as I recall (and I hence use OpenAL)).
As to habits, they can be broken (when called for), I feel. 
Of recent Panda projects, only a few; you can actually find a few small projects of mine in the Code Snippets and Showcase sections of this forum, as I recall.