3dsMax has a powerful non-destructive workflow with assigning material-IDs individually to faces or even objects.
This way you can easily control a complex shading for any object, which is maybe made of 10 or more different shaders (called "sub-materials")
Then shaded only with one "Multi/Sub-Object material".
1.) It would be great to have that system in Maya. Material IDs are also useful for many other tasks, e.g. to clearly address faces for VFX/particles.
2.) It would make it possible to import shaders from 3dsMax
(at the moment it's the main reason, why 3dsMax scenes are incompatible! because Maya doesn't know Material ID's and has no corresponding shader)
Attached screenshots for people who don't know the system.
Note: It is not the same as texture layering or layered shaders, instead, it has a very simple clear layout.
But it relies on Material IDs, for which it would need a clear simple system to assign them.
