So I've been dabbling with Maya for a few weeks now, after using MAX every day for a year, and I've gotten over most of the differences in how they go about doing things.

But two things are still really sticking out for me. One is that I really, really miss how you can use the shift key in MAX to duplicate something as you're moving or resizing or rotating the duplicated object. It's super convenient.

The biggest one, though, and the one I can't figure out, is why Maya is still so hell-bent on creating all objects at the origin. In MAX, I could just draw a cube or sphere or whatever wherever I wanted it to be in the scene, and it would start there. It drives me crazy that I'm so dependent on the origin in Maya, that I have to completely finish something at that one point, then move it, for there to be any kind of efficiency. Why doesn't Alias do it MAX's way? Is there some reason that being forced to create everything in the same place makes sense?

Don't get me wrong, Maya is a far cry from the crashing and the frustration of MAX... I can already see it's a much better written application. But why stick with these old systems when there's something better? Am I just not seeing the use of it?