Ahh sorry Matt was having a bit of a bad day yesterday.
Hard drive failure on a new computer which was rendering out a video for work. The noise they make before they die is incredible.
Not to mention a puncture on the way to work and of course.....mondays.......grumble

Ok all I was saying is I love it when I see people interested in digital art and then having a rubbish program hold them back. Its not a grudge against you and your work. Please dont think it is.

Oh dear...maya vs max argument. Yeah well in my field I have been involved in a lot of these.
Honestly nowadays there is really not much difference. Both are owned by autodesk and both share many features. Like rendering with mental ray and sharing the same texture nodes for it. Like MIA_material and DGS_shader.

From personal experience max has a more user friendly system for setting up environment renders. Maya has a better animation system. I have heard people regard the Max animation controlles as clunky.
Leo is right, mayas dynamics have improved a lot over maxs. The N system in the last couple of years has been incorporated into maya. Making cloth animation simple for non coding experts.
My experiments.
http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgj9Qbfy0Ts
Now in 2009 one of my friends told me the liquid system has been replaced by the N system. Which sounds awesome.

But yeah....I will leave that argument there. In a few CG forums, topics on this are banned strait away. The programs are just tools and its up to the artists to make anything good out of them.
As for MS paint.....sigh.
Sure, you can get away using it when quickly trying to explain something to someone over msn but for lab reports....