Just as an aside and probably of academic interest at this point - you can speed up the selection of the corner facets in Hex by selecting the corner verts and converting selection to faces :)

Yes, that's another good way to get those faces selected quickly, although I found paint-selecting them to be almost just as fast.  My biggest obstacle with Hex was that after you use the "extrude surface" tool to intrude central square faces into the object, the software does not retain the face selections, so you have to waste time re-selecting them again, just to delete them.  On the other hand, if you use the "fast extrude", it does retain the selection, but that tool doesn't seem to work for axial extrusions like this.  Only the "Sweep surface", or "extrude surface" tools worked for that operation, but they don't seem to retain the initial selections.  What's worse, if you forget to Validate an action, and go on to another action, often times it causes buggy behavior that seems irreversible in some cases  No matter. It was a fun challenge, just to see how it would be done in other software, but I won't be going back to Hex again. I just wanna make it clear that I think Hex is a good software.  It just really needs some attention in the programming dept., and unfortunately, it's not going to get it, so I'm not going to bother continuing on with it.  I will admit that it does have some great tools, they just need more refining, and thought.

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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.