It would be nice if the sun in the mr Phys sky map was disabled as default since it doubles up with the mr sun.

"Preview selection" should definitely be on by default. It greatly aids modeling by giving visual feedback about the element to be selected. It's so much easier selecting vertex/edge/poly when you know the result in advance.

The reflectivity parameter for a new Arch&Design material is 0.6, which is too high most of the time. A lower value would be more useful, especially for new users.

For some reason, the default Skylight as it's created has a color that's a little bit blue. With all due respect, I'll choose what color I want. All this does is add a bit of confusion. Especially for new people when they bring a Skylight bake into Photoshop and then wonder why everything has a blue tint to it.

Ambient Occlusion is very bad in "makr preview". Add Iterations settings to make preview dialog for setup quality of AO.

Since most TV and Film is 24 fps these days, that should be the default rather than 30.

With the ability to downsave to 2010, it would be great if you could save all your 2012 files as 2010. when handing files off to other companies, not everyone has the latest max and this could reduce wasted time.

Shift + Drag a poly should extrude. like it does for edges. NOT make a new poly.

Softimage has this. Think of all the times you have to go click the extrude or press Shift + E then click and drag, then click back to move/select another edge.

Speed up workflow!

Activate by default the support for IBL mental ray string options.

The current workaround is to edit the mi files.

Q should default to Select Object, not Smart Select Object. One thing that happens to newbies a lot, is that they hit Q several times, which changes the selection mode from Rectangle to Lasso or Spray, and then they don't know how/why it happened.

switch the spacebar hotkey (lock) to something more productive, like a maximize viewport (alt+W). like maya I think. or switch to show all textures on all objects with lights

I don't know why the vault plugin is installed as default, it makes a mess in the asset tracking for those who doesn't use vault. Can you please remove it from the default install?

The shortcut for Redo should be something like Ctrl+Shift+Z

New users don't see a use for Redo because the two shortcuts are far apart on the keyboard. But it's a good way to flip back and forth between a change to see what it looks like before/after.

Objects controlled by a path constraint have unrealistic linear keys by default. A lot of people don't even know this can be changed. A bezier float makes the path movement much more natural.

Default Create Light drop-down should be Standard, not Photometric (at least in 3ds max, not 3ds max Design.) Unless I'm specifically doing architectural visualization, I never use photometric lights.

Working extremely close on vertices, whether the object is large or small can be difficult because of viewport clipping. Portions of the mesh appear to disappear. Leaving the clipping to the max and min values eliminates this issue and should be default.

In the design flavor, the default key-frame is created at frame 1 by default. This is inconsistent with files coming from max, and introduces bugs in CAT.

For those like me who only use the noise modifier for modeling. Every time we add one in the modifier stack, we have to remove the phase keys...

Make MATERIAL GET in the material editor. Pipette is weak.;/

Default scale in the material editor should look similar to the viewport/render!

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=954076

See Bobo's response on this subject.