Michael

Thanyou for your continued honest repsonses in this thread and taking the time to respond and offer suggestions on how I might overcome problems. All of them have been very helpful and I know it does indeed take time to type responses.

Yes there are definitely some things sub'd is better at and somethings nurbs are better at so best to use the right tool for the job at hand. Now that I have both, I'll always have the right tool for the job.

>In addition to using MoI for boolean-oriented pieces, one other workflow that may appeal to you is to use
> some of the surfacing tools in MoI to create a kind of rough base form quickly, then take that into your
> polygon package and use some of the newish style retopologizing tools to rework it into a sub-d friendly
> form and then continue to work on it as polygons.

Yes, I've seen that functionality in modo (It doesn't exist in 3DS Max as far as I know).
Your idea of knocking up the basic shapes with Nurbs quickly and refining them from there in a polymodeller is great suggestion, one that I'm sure will work well.

>Anyway, sorry that the NURBS toolset did not deliver on what you expected.
> I think it will be a lot more in line with your expectations for the more mechanical type pieces.

For sure.