It's difficult to believe that among all the expert Maya professionals out there, no-one knows the answer to this question!

Am I to believe that Maya, probably the largest, richest, most complex software application I have ever used, capable of doing almost everything except fixing my kitchen sink, LACKS the capacity to do something as basic and ESSENTIAL as ordering the export material list so the exported static mesh has its materials in the same order?

What if I want to delete a material? Let's take a specific (simple) example.

I want to create a box, which will be a static mesh in my game. I'm also going to create a collision model for the box. I assign a single material to the box, and NO material to the collision model.

Now, I select both together and use the axmesh plugin to export the .ase file. How many materials does the box have? Two, according to Axmesh, but that's because Maya automatically assigned a lambert material to the collision model, so that material is in the list of materials to be exported with the mesh. And when I import the mesh into my game editor, sure enough it has two materials. Axmesh is right, there are a total of two materials involved here, but I only want to use one of them (the specifically assigned one) on my mesh. So there has to be a way to delete the unwanted lambert material from the material list prior to export. Otherwise, the exported mesh has (in this case) TWO sections, and in the game that means it is essentially TWO objects and requires more time to draw.

So all you static mesh builders for games are simply exporting your meshes that have collision models with an extra section, and you don't care that you're forcing the graphics card do extra unnecessary work during gametime? You count polygons down to the nth degree, but then casually double the number of logical meshes in your game? Really?