Well, if you don’t mind crashes then I guess Max system is good.
Personally i mind crashes, so I think it is unusable.
Crashes should be pulled out of parentheses here. The only thing that never crashes is a thing that doesn’t work in the first place. Crashes are bugs in existing code. Blender doesn’t have what’s commonly expected from a grouping system, so of course that non-existent system isn’t crashing. Objectively, it can’t be “better” in this regard.
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I disagree. It is better not to have a certain function than to have a useless one which confuses people, clutters the UI and possibly wastes development resources.
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Well that settles it then. Blender needs a grouping system that is useful, isn’t confusing, doesn’t clutter the UI and isn’t a waste development resources 
“Blender doesn’t need grouping because grouping crashes [for you] in Max”. That’s a non-sequitur.
This is exactly true for Blender’s collections as well, to the T. Only they simply lack other features commonly expected from groups, because they were never designed for that purpose.
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No it is not. You can not parent a Blender collection to an object.
In Max you can and this, I believe, is one of the things that makes Max groups prone to crashing.
I agree completely.
There is something disturbing about the current collection system - it’s simply, but I don’t get it.
The thing is I am doing 3D since 20 years now. I SHOULD get it easily, it should not confuse me.
I am usually humble enough to accept my failure, in this case I blame the system - its not well thought out if it confuses me.
The UI isn’t really helping.
Overall I would say, Blender has a SERIOUS problem with scene management as a whole its not just the missing grouping. Since we have no proper groups, Blender does not know the concept of group modifiers. Why? WHY? Nobody thought of using a group as a means to apply a modifier like Subdivision surface or mirror to it? Really?
I believe you, but it is irrelevant to this discussion. C4d and Maya do get it done and they are not prone to crash when grouping. I have worked in both with ten thousands of objects.
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Okay, not to the T then, still close enough. Let’s stay constructive here. Grouping crashing for you in Max, and what you think could be causing those crashes, are not valid reasons to not implement grouping in Blender. A great many things may be “crashing” in Max, and in Blender. Yesterday I had UV editor crash ten times. Should I switch to Max for my UV editing now?..
This is about lack of useful functionality.
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That is good to hear. I would love to have a working grouping system. Okavango said that all apps have a grouping system and I stated why I don’t think that the one in Max should count and why I think that it is probably more complicated than it sounds.
Anyway, if a good grouping system can be implemented, I am all for it, even though after working without one for 20 years I personally don’t really need one.
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I wasn’t trying to nitpick here. The additional hierarchy is what I believe makes it more difficult to implement crash free.
I mean if you look at grouping it sounds really easy. Just press a button an make several objects (temporarily) act like a single one. But if you regard hierarchies and constraints it gets complicated.
There already is all that additional hierarchy in Blender, save, as you said, parenting collections to objects. You can have objects in multiple collections, parented to objects in other collections which are parts of yet other collections which may or may not be ten levels down one of the aforementioned collections. You can have objects parented to objects in one collection belong to another collection. Or ten. Constrained to objects that are yet again spread out across a hundred other collections.
You can misuse or abuse almost any tool, that doesn’t mean you should do it, nor does it invalidate the practical usage of the tool.
Technically true, but as you argued not everyone’s grouping system is equal. Houdini and the recently deceased XSI have complete different systems. C4d and Maya are basically identical in terms of functionality.
The system in Maya is basically the same as if you would parent to an empty in Blender. So the system is already there, you can parent to empty’s and even export that hierarchy to Maya.
The problem is that the UI and the Outliner must support this as a feature.
In Maya you see every object of an group highlighted if you select the group in the outliner.
You can pickwalk up and down the hirarchy. If you hide the group, all the members/childs get hidden.
In Blender all of this ease of use functionality is missing. If you hide the empty-group, only the empty gets hidden. If you copy the empty group, only the empty gets copied etc… its frustrating.
But on the other hand, the underlying functionality is already there. Emptys as groups just need to be elevated to an official group status and the UI and outliner enabled to handle them like such.
All the rigging/constraining stuff is already handled.
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Perhaps, but that is what makes it complicated because it can divide hierarchies.
The hierarchies in Blender are all independant from each other.
Lets say you parent object A to object B.
Then put object A into a group
Then parent the group to object C.
Now object A is parented to object B AND through the group to object C.
And it gets more complicated if you group object B into a second group an then group this second group into the first group. It is really easy to get depency loops this way.
Ok, then Mayas and C4Ds groups hava lot less functionality than the groups in 3ds Max.
In Blender this can currently be done by selecting an object in a collection and pressing
shift-g → o
But, yes, it would be nice to be able to condense this down into a goup even if the additional functionality that Max groups have is lost.
You say that now. But I would actually bet a bottle of whiskey/vodka on the fact that the moment you have one like in C4d or Maya you’ll never would want to work without it EVER again.
20 years ago I learned 3DsMax in Design School. It had no object manager back then, just a list of objects. I think this was one of the most prominent reasons for me to NOT use Max further down the line and I picked C4d instead.
That’s, just confusing. My head hurts. Nested groups are easy and I can visually understand them by just looking at them.
Collections is like playing 4D chess.
Now I am curious, what else can you do with them in Max?
If you parent things like this then maybe that’s why you get a crash in 3ds max.
Well, like I said, you can parent groups to objects independantly of what is inside the group.
This is a very powerful feature if it works. Unfortuneately it does not work good enough.
Otherwise nothing. In other regards they are a lot less powerfull than collections in Blender. Max does things that collections do with other features such as selections sets, layers and stuff like that. I don’t like that but others do I guess.
Can you tell what’s going to happen if you move the Empty in this file?
collection_madness.blend (138.3 KB)
This is a moot point. Collections aren’t groups. They’re not replacement for groups, nor they are an alternative to groups. They are a replacement for layers with ad-hoc instancing capability that creates as many problems as it solves, if not more.
This topic is supposed to be about a “better” grouping system, so why are we still talking about something that isn’t a grouping system at all? 
Exactly my observation.
Yeah, and now imagine being able to set this sort of nonsense up in an extremely trivial way. Like with two clicks. And instead of your objects floating off indicating that there is something wrong it just crashes.
How does Maya/C4D handle the following:
You have a hierarchy of objects. You group all the objects except for the top most parent.
Is the top most parent simply thrown out of the hierarchy?