When I went to an autodesk product demo where they touched on Max Vs maya, they pretty much said that each product did the same but was pitched at different users, when I say users I mean customer bases, to which you seem to have found out as they said that Max was more Architectural Vis and that maya was more high end film and TV works (to give borard defintitions).

As for the merger, my point of view is that if they did merge them they would be a bit silly, I mean defining 2 products with different aims and different core architectures and then merging them?? Who would win out?? No one, and they would probably loose customers.

Also Maya aint got V ray, well Max aint got ncloth, or cmuscle or the functionality to mess with a lot of custom coding... All depends on what you want to do if your into characters and TD works then you probably aing gonna be bothered with Vray not being there.

So I dont think that Autodesk are killing Maya, if they were they would have done it a long timeago.

Also why did you loose work because you couldent use Vray? As long as it looks good I wouldnt have thought that the type of render was a problem?

Thers is this but its a link from about 3 years ago ,so you would have thought you might have heard something

https://www.chaosgroup.com/pr/20051122_01.html