Hi,
Coming from a LW/Modo background for the most part and primarily just play and hobby, I have a few questions on things that I can not get my head around.

First-
is the Poly Face selection. Selecting faces is odd to me. There is the little handle in the middle to select. I have found in the preferences, that I can select "whole face". I am used to the whole face method, but selecting is still weird. Can I only select via a bounding box/lasso or strategically selecting with LMB individual or multiple polys? Is there a method that I can just hold my mouse button and paint over my selection? I guess this is called raycasting in some other programs. There are probably plug-ins to do this, but cannot MAYA do it natively?

Second-
Merging Polys. In its most simple form, imagine a 2 poly face by 2 poly face plane. That is a simple square plane with 2 faces vertical and 2 horizontal. Is there some sort of merge tool that can eliminate all the polys and make one Poly? I see merge vertices, collapse, merge edges, etc.., but cannot do this simple thing.

Third-
Scaling individual faces. If I have a plane with a bunch of selected polys, how do I scale each one locally? Or each selection locally? I have used the extend and the offset within extend and it works good but creates more polys.

Fourth-
Slicing rows of polys. I know of the Split Polygon tool and it is nice. I also have the MAYA Bonus Tools and MJ Poly tools. Is there a way to do multiple splits on an edge/poly ring? Everything seems to be one loop slice at a time. I can slide them manually and add more, but to do for example 3 evenly spaced splits down a selected row of polys or edges is nice.

I have used the MAYA help files and learned alot of other things sort of related to all this. I am sure that all of this is buried in there someplace as well. I am almost as lost in MAYAs help file as I am in MAYA. MAYA and its Help file are both very huge and robust programs, but I am determined to get decent with them. The majority of my stuff will just be models and stills/renders.

I am hoping to take Jason Busby's (3DBuzz) class at Oregon3D in July. I know that all of this type of stuff will be covered in there, but I want to get a little familiar first.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks