"The biggest advantage Maya has is MEL."

I hear this a lot... In Max its called Max Script. You can do almost anything in Max Script you can do in Max. There's also a cute, quasi-VB editor for making roll-outs and buttons and spinners too. I've only ever written scripts to ease some monotonous exporting tasks, but there is a metric ton of others I use to do all kinds of crazy things. Max Script has been around since version 2(?) but it was only version 3-4 were they finally attached all the systems to the scripting language.

"Does it still not have IK?"

Yes there's IK... this is another myth in the package wars. The first releases of Max did not have proper IK... at least you wouldn't want to use it... so I can understand why people would say it doesn’t exist. The IK has been improved in each release, as that has always been one of the bigger complaints. The Max 5 IK is pretty good... I am not a full time animator, but I have used it several times recently to animate some small critters. It's a lot easier to set up and use now. I've seen some crazy cool set ups with expression sliders and controllers. I'd like to have some time to brush up on that again.

Max also didn't originally ship with any proper skinning tools. You had to buy "Character Studio" with its “Physique” modifier if you wanted to do any proper vertex weighting. Max now ships with "Skin", a vertex weighting modifier. I didn't use the previous versions at all, but version 5's Skin is in many respects better than Physique. Full envelops, tendons, bulge control, morph angles, and paint-able weighting... (sound familiar?)

In Max’s defense, it has always had Character Studio available, which has Biped for quick (wait for it) bipedal animation. It takes a little getting used to, but the pre-built constraints and balancing makes animating humanoids really simple. I’ve not used the “footsteps” a whole lot, (I’m old-school) but the few times I have it has been invaluable for animating things like multiple characters over rough terrain quickly and realistically. I’ve always been curious if there is a Maya equivalent?

”I'm not trying to knock Max, it certainly has it's place.”

Heh… I’m interested in what you would define its place to be? I don’t mean this to be accusatory, but that sounds exactly like the sort of package-superiority dismissal that I find so tiresome in this industry.

It is sad though, what has happened to SoftImage. I’ve never used it for production. I’ve heard raves about its animation capabilities, but some of the modeling tools seemed very primitive. And the texturing process looked like an exercise in futility. I got very excited when they were purchased by Microsoft, hoping they would pour money into the company and make it the penultimate package… but we all know that went nowhere. What’s the word on the ETA for the next version?