YAY@!  I finally figured it out a workaround to doing similar 3dsmax bevels in Blender, thanks to the suggestions from everyone here!

keppel and Cybermonk's thoughts about pivots and to hold down the mouse key while tapping on S worked!  The trick is to set the Pivot centers to "individual origins", as was surmised earlier, and then I can select opposing faces without symmetry, use the E key to extrude, and holding down the mouse button, tap the S key to scale.  The results are exactly what I was looking for...

And the GOOD news is that the workflow to this technique is only mildly more time consuming than the bevel tool in 3dsmax, so that's totally acceptable.  Phew!  Finally.  This will help my workflow immensely for things like spacecraft, and other hard surface modelling tasks.

I still think the bevel and inset tools in Blender can use a little more thought and improvement.  Inset, in particular, feels like a tool which was more or less an after-thought in the Blender arsenal.  It's supposed to be a tool intended to work together with face extrude and bevelling, but here in Blender, it almost seems lost in the mix.  Considering that even "low-end" modelling software like Hexagon did a great job with their dynamic extrusion tool. Inset, extrude, and bevel are all part of the same tool in Hexagon, and can all be engaged seamlessly, just by using the mouse buttons.  This kind of synergy really helps speed up the modelling process.  I think Blender Foundation has a different logic when it comes to the modelling process than the industry standards, and from what I have read, feel they more or less have "cut the fat" out of their tools.  However, in the case of those 3 very important modelling tools, I don't see the progressive thinking.

I'd like to really thank ALL of you for helping me here so far, and for being so knowledgable, and gracious in sharing that knowledge with an "outsider", so to speak.  lol

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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.