Venom will tell you that you can customize the interface for Max to suit your tastes. I'll tell you the same thing for Lightwave. I've reorganized my buttons and my tabs so they work right for me.
What I'd really like is to have those tabs down the left side and have tabs for layers across the top. It doesn't make sense to me that the tabs for changing button groups spreads across the top of the workspace.
Now, what I could really kill for is to have Lightwave's Undo stack turned into something like Photoshops undo, or the Max modifier stack. I'd love to be able to browse back through a list of modifications and make changes to the order in which I did things, and have those changes cascade through all the subsequent modification actions.
