The purpose for the polygon reduction is to make it more manageable for use in Unity3D as a game object.

I know there are tons of posts on this topic, and I've been reading through a lot of them, but haven't found a clear answer.

The COLLADA export is close it just does funny things with the conforming clothes. Perhaps I have to re-parent the meshes to the bones after importing into 3DS Max.

Cheers.