Well posting as a relative newcomer and perhaps not eligible to give advice, nevertheless, for the longest time I avoided Maya because I could not fathom the whacked out "nurbs to sub-d back to poly then to nurbs then to..."workflow that I would find in all the tutorials. The only reason I can now actually use it is because I've ignored all that and just use polygons and the smooth (3) key. Basically in other packages this is what's called Sub-D modeling and I don't recognize Maya's Sub-ds, they just seem to create messy meshes. Perhaps I would convert a finished mesh into sub-ds at the very end if it was never going to deform and was staying inside a Maya pipeline, but for pure modeling why make the process so convoluted, check the internet and you will see that any kind of complex shape can be created with simple quad poly meshes smoothed.

Take my words with caution though because I'm still at the learning stage with Maya.