Yep, I must have double-extruded on the faces by accident, causing some internal faces to occur, which were not intended.  That's just my inexperience in using the E tool in Blender really, not a reflection of any software malfunction.  Blender's Extrude is fast.  Maybe too fast.  As soon as you engage the E hotkey, and move the mouse, the extrusion begins on the selected faces.  Yes, that's an efficient tool, but can lead to some mistakes if you are just beginning to use it.  In 3dsmax, the process is much the same, except the extrusion only occurs when you press down on the left mouse.  This is the rare case where I have found Blender to be less clicks for an operation than Max, but also harder to control.  It's funny the differences in workflow I'm finding between these two great applications.

I also used Maya for nearly a year.  It was a software I never owned or used personally, but many studios were using it, and I needed a job.  So I quickly learned to model in Maya, and the transition to it was sooo much easier from 3dsmax than Blender is proving to be.  Maya's modelling tools functioned about the same as 3dsmax, but they were aweful buggy.  Crashes and screen freeze happened on the regular whenever I was poly modelling something heavy, and Maya's symmetry feature in regard to poly modelling was the worst of all in terms of stability.  Don't know if the latest version improved on that any, but it was so frustrating.  At least so far, I'm finding Blender very stable.  It seems to almost never crash to desktop.  I have had to restart it once or twice, because the tools stopped working though.  I had a good run in latest versions of 3dsmax, where I didn't experience any crashes for weeks, so I'm liking the fact that Blender has good stability.  Maya, at least on Windows, was the worst!

I'm noticing where "Blender" got it's name.  It appears to be a combination of Maya, 3dsmax, and XSI in the way it's tools and UI function.  I think it leans toward XSI, but some things, like it's modifiers and Loop Tools, were definitely inspired by 3dsmax.  The Loop Tools are almost exactly the same, minus a few detail features.  I'm using those probably the most so far of any of Blender's tools, outside of Extrude.

NEXT QUESTION:

Ok guys, here's one which has had me scratching my head since I began learning Blender.  It has to do with modifiers.  3dsmax might be the king of modifiers, and the way it works there is simple. You can apply modifiers to an entire object, element, or even just selected faces on any object.  Simply go into polygon mode, select a few faces, and apply any modifier, and that modifier will work on just those selected faces or edge, or vertices.  In Blender, however, I'm finding it not quite as simple as that.  Modifiers need to be defined by vertex groups, or edge weights, etc.  For example, I wish to use the displacement modifier on only the faces I have selected, and not the overall entire object.  What would I need to do first in order to make that happen, because i have some faces selected, but simply applying the modifier causes the deformation to happen to the entire object.  This has me stumped.

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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.