Here are some points to ponder.

Max has strengths in the world building (gaming) arena.

Religion aside.

Are there any aspects of Max that are a) implemented better than Maya, and b) exist that are not in Maya at this time? Any aspects, even tiny aspects, any at all that would enhance Maya in future generations?

There is a lot of very good 3D Applications out there. Some are proprietary, belonging to various houses. ILM, Pixar, et al. all have in house tools that provide specialty and general purpose 3D production.

A movie I saw recently had a virtual Soup to Nuts line up of Applications that were used to create all of the CGI.

Houdini was used for particle effects. Keep in mind that MAX's reactor dynamics do some really unique things also and Maya, with an easier to understand interface is a strong player in the particle arena. In today’s world no one application can do it all. ILM has some incredible tools at its disposal, Maya is just simply one of them.

Speaking as a developer, top notch programmers from both camps will now have access to “peek” under each others cloaked secrets, or under the hood.

I suspect that ideas will flow and some people will have epiphanies and other celestial awakenings with the new code that they see and start to see strategies of implementing some new features.

How do you suppose Maya would improve if say, Maya had bought https://www.naturalmotion.com/files/e...v2_5_Oct05.pdf (and these folks only want 9 to 11 thou https://www.naturalmotion.com/pages/sales.htm for their stuff.

Corel purchased Jasc Software awhile back and to tell you the truth I haven’t noticed any changes at all from a users perspective. They introduced a new version fairly quickly this have been about 5 or 6 months.

It takes time for restructuring and all sorts of other things to have any real impact on everyday life with Maya users. Maya has a large installed base and any company that did NOT recognize that factor would be idiotic. Autodesk is NOT idiotic. The two companies started within a year of each other.

It is my belief that Maya will continue in its present form for some time to come, and gradually over time, some new features may be added that will only make it better.

Chill, the sky in NOT falling in …. At least not YET or today
Many Regards,

wizzie