Thanks again, Zandar.  Yes, I'm finding many things about Blender I didn't expect to find.  I have most of the addons in Preferences turned on already, and I've added a few of my own I found online.

Nice to hear input from a former Max user.  I'm not prepared to give up using 3dsmax, I'm just interested in learning Blender as a backup, in case AD decide to discontinue the software, which has been their M.O. recently.

Yeah, I noticed there is a Loft tool in Blender's Loop Tools.  It's a nice touch of "home" for me, but is definitely not the full featured tool I have in Max.  That's ok, because I rarelly needed it anyway.  I don't do much spline or curve based modelling.  Blender has Nurbs.  I know I saw them in there.  Don't know if the modelling tools for Nurbs are as good as in Max, but Max is not a good Nurbs modeller anyway!  Now the Patch modelling, I might miss a little more.  I often used Patch topology as easy way to get nice smooth curved surfaces, then converted them over to polys in the end.

Max can do some degree of fluid effects with it's Particle Flow, but they are not true fluid simulations, so I'll be eager to experiement with that feature in Blender to be sure.  For now, however, I'm only interested in the modelling tools.  I really want to be able to model in Blender as "fluidly" as I had done in Max.  I have a long way to go.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.