Thanks for the info Machinery_Frank!

I just watched a tutorial for Lightwave where the guy did a extrude to smooth out a plane after performing a boolean with a sphere on the plane? This seemed kind of odd to me, as its just correcting the shading by adding an extra face around the edges -there were already similar faces there. Im sure the shading problems were created because of odd shaped polys created by the boolean, but I would have fixed it different -I wouldn't want to add an extra extrude where I hadn't planned. So probably not really a problem with Lightwave.

Some engines can recognize Max's smoothing groups, but I get your point. Smoothing groups are very useful for renders with lowery-poly geometry.

I do agree that Lightwave seems like an incredible deal, very feature rich. I'll give the trial a go and see if I can get used to the workflow.