1) It seems like Maya gets all the love when it comes to shaders, material, plug-ins, etc..  Max,
for example has 11 shaders, Maya, close to a 100.  And even 100 isn’t what I would call a huge selection.  A better balance and variety among all your programs would be SO nice.  I wish the AREA was ‘the place’ to come to when looking for a texture, material or script.  Right now the best places are not the AREA, sorry.  The one place Max wins in this department is tutorials and tips.  The Tutorial numbers seem pretty equal, but Max has a few more tips. 

2) I don’t use Max Design, but wouldn’t those shaders and plugins listed for Max Regular work for that too?  When you do a search for Max Design you get nothing.

3) It would be nice to be able to view areas of the site without having to login.  I recently subscribed to some blogs and when I’m reading on a different device, I don’t want to have to log in just to watch a tutorial.

4) The Area has always seem sluggish when doing certain things like posting, searching and some page loading in general.  Is it a network issue?  Do you have mirrors of the site or is it only hosted in Canada?

Those are my thoughts for now.  On a positive note, I really like the improvements the AREA has made in recent years.  The homepage has a nice mix of information and it seems to be keeping up with trends like Twitter, Facebook and Blogs.

Yep very nice suggestions there.

I too would like to make a suggestion regarding the Video Tutorials. The tutorials are very nice done but they are very huge in size. It is very annoying on slow connections as they take very much time to be seen. It would be better that there shuld also be a youtube equivalent link for these videos too. So that its upto the users choice, where he wants to look them.

I would also suggest that the SIGGRAPH Inhouse Videos be hosted on Youtube immediately.

2) I don’t use Max Design, but wouldn’t those shaders and plugins listed for Max Regular work for that too?  When you do a search for Max Design you get nothing.

They should work in either, they are virtually the same. Though it is important to get the right one when installing hotfixes and service packs.
Plugins, shaders and scripts should not be a problem.

On the subject of Area Suggestions, it would be nice to have an Area Wishlist, like there is for the software (Max Wishlist), where this kind of thing is disscussed.

The Area is a good site, the problem I find with other sites related with Max, Maya & Softimage, is sometimes you have to dig your way though basic questions,only to come across three or four advanced question that don’t help with relating to your question.  The area forums are not active, but what is active ? On other forums, they may be active, but with new user questions, I also find other forums to be some what mis-managed or very out dated, as in they haven’t changed the look of the site for an awful long time and gave it a fresh look. 

This site just needs the attention, and the users, but with the negativity that has surrounded The Area which I just can’t see.