I'd love to see an ascii file format similar to the /ma format for maya. The advantage of this is we could edit max files to do small things with no need to open the file in the max interface. Like for example...

1) Say you have a giant max file that takes 10 min to open, but all you need to do is modify a single bitmap in a material, far easier to do that by editing the text file and doing a search and replace.
2) You want to swap out this bitmap in 20 files, you could write a python script run from the command line to edit the ascii files and replace without the need to open up the max files in the interface.
3) If a file gets corrupt, you could potentially go into the ascii file and delete the part that is crashing max. This allows for all sorts of possibilities recovering work that otherwise would be completely lost.