Dunno how you work, or how you models look or what your are aiming for a polygon count on your models, but making the movement parts of a model with 1 vertex weight ist completly different than that with multiple weights.

Maybe i have to repost the picture from alienheretic so that you can see the difference, or show me one of your models how they look with that kind of animation, but if you go for 5000 or more tris i would REALLY be interested how you would animate this with only 1 weight. Hard corners on every arm, knee, or every other modelpart or do you use for every vertex 1 bone? (joking)

And of cource i dont use the max2mdl plugin becource its outdated. And iam talking here about BONEANIMATION and not VERTEXANIMATION. That it is working very well with pure vertexanimation that know we all (i hope), but tell me 1 (one) game from the last years which did not use boneanimations for character models. Hope i have not to go and tell the advertages of bone vs vertex - dunno how good your knowlegde in this area is. Mine is very well and everyone knows that on character starting from 2500 tris upwards, weighting is more and more needed. Even on fingers it is today usual to weight the vertexes to get smooter movement.