Well with what HappyDay did with Prominence and Blender now is a good opportunity to at least begin the process of examination and with my bit of playing around there is certainly a lot that can be done and the only hard part is conveying what the addition of a 3d editing application can added to the tool set as far as discovery goes.
To get a jump start you could go to any site that offers creative common models that you can use to either play around with or even included in your map as to fair use.
A good place to go to start.
http://www.renderosity.com/A good place to start would be anything built for Poser or Daz studio as 9 time out of 10 you can get them as an obj object as well fully textured.
I would also recommend adding DazStudio to the mix as well.
With DazStudio you can collect and catalog a lot of different 3D objects to use as map objects.
As a suggestion don't look at the big picture but instead look for ways and means of adding to your own works at the per item level and QA player tests I had done using GrandHall, which is abusive beyond what is necessary, I don't think anyone is going to run into to many problems as they do now with maps in 4.2.
P.S. You don't have to use just 3ds Max and there are many free alternatives you can use and if one is already a master at Radiant it should not be all that hard to add an editor like Blender as they both do more or less the same thing but in a slightly different manner.