One more thing before I go tonight.

I don't know if you're familiar with Blur Studio.  If not, you need to look them up and see some of their productions.  These guys produce some of the best animated 3DCG on the planet for cinematic game trailors and also short movies and special FX.  They were nominated for an Oscar for one of their shorts, and always continue to push the envelope of what is possible with 3D.  Up until fairly recently, Blur were famously using only 3dsMax as their modelling, rendering, and animation production software.  In fact, Splutterfish, who are the creators of the Brazil rendering system, was founded by a couple guys who worked for Blur, and Blur actually incorporated a lot of the features you see in the 3dsmax application today on their own, way before we ever actually saw them commercially available in the retail version of the app.  If it had not been for great studios like Blur and a few others (Animal Logic, Blizzard Ent., and The Orphanage), 3dsmax may have never been taken seriously for character animation at cinema level, because the app was never originally intended for that purpose.  Anyway, my point is this... Blur Studios recently incorporated XSI into their pipeline for character animation, and were one of those who originally helped dev XSI's high end Face Robot.  Maybe they did more than help dev the software, but that's what I read.  They still use 3dsMax for modelling and rendering, but now it's out to XSI for animation.  So although this may not interest you, it says something right there about XSI's great animation support and features.