@chippwalters: Funny you mention ZBrush and hard-surface modelling. Some days ago I found a video from Zbrush Summit. The guys from Red Storm Enterprises show a little bit of their workflow (https://youtu.be/Fg6QPJ7XirE?t=1187). They show how they doing box modelling in Max to get base shape and shapes for boolean operations which they do in ZBrush via DynaMesh.
When I saw that, I was just wondering why they do not Solid modelling only. Would be much faster....