My god.  All these years, and I never knew how to use that animate mode, because I never tried clicking the damn Settings button to bring up the parameters!  My stubbornness just assumed it was for adjusting something already animated! Not only that, but I'm totally ashamed to admit that I didn't realize until now that the DELETE MESH modifier could also be used on sub-object selections!  Yep.  Believe that one?  I thought it was just there to be used for deleting a mesh at the object level, and useful for making things "disappear" in an animation (which it is).  I feel completely amateur right now, after 10 years of using Max.

Really quick, one other interesting thing I noticed is that I can add two or more edit polys in the stack as you said, and all the parameters seem editable until I press "commit", or "cancel" buttons.  It appears I can also decide to select different sets of  polygons on the object, in those edit poly modifiers, and completely change where I first created those actions (insets, extrusions, bevels, or whatever).  This is more than interesting to me!  This is very useful, and I really didn't know I could do this.  Why weren't these features pushed as bullet points by Autodesk when they were implimented?!  I'm assuming these things were available for a very long time in Max, and I never knew it until now because no one talks about them!  I guess if I read the manual like a novel, I would know, but this is really cool stuff here, and should have been considered revolutionary capabilities at the time they were put into the software years ago!  Sorry to sound like a newb here guys, but I'm doing a face-palm to myself right now.

---

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

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