I have a rig, and I can purchase unrigged characters and rig them. I've to do that a fair few times recently. It's not difficult, but it's counter productive and an unwanted drag on a project's time line.

Sometimes I do an entire character from scratch, model it, rig it, render... I love doing the full character pipeline, I really enjoy it.

the point that isn't getting across is this:
I work for an agency that does a huge amount of fast turn around work. I do Iphone and Flash games, as well as rich media web sites, and all three of those project types frequently call for rendered animation sequences, character walk/run/attack/whatever loops, etc...

We work with large budgets and affording premade character models is absolutely not an issue, what IS an issue is meeting a release date sometimes only days away, therefore needing something immediately ready to use.

The other day I needed a rigged Wolf. I've barely touched quadrupedal rigging before so I wasn't comfortable dragging the project timeline out while I looked into the kinematic and skeletal structure of a four legged animal. Learning is not the point. Getting a job out the door in time is.

I found an absolutely perfect wolf. It looks awesome, has a great rig, and even came with a run cycle I would have used for reference, or modified to suit what we need.

Only problem is it's an XSI file, and converting it to Maya format destroys the rigging information.

Could I learn to rig a wolf? Absolutely. Would the job get finished in time if I did that? Probably not.

A few weeks ago we needed a "generic businessman". Something like the default Poser characters would have even been enough. I have a heap of rigged characters in Maya already, but nothing that looked the part. I ended up applying an existing rig to a model we bought, because I was only resourced for about 8 hours of work on the entire project. It worked, but it sucked to have to do that.

I find it interesting that there seems to be an entirely different community and mentality around Max.

I don't really want to bring that software up again because I don't know how to use it, and I don't want to learn it.

But there are just so many models available in that format, those guys have it sorted.

I can't understand why no one is generating Maya content, other than the software is just surrounded by an entirely different mentality.