Hi dude.. in my experience you need a forearm twist bone. Dont forget Paul Neale (PEN scripts) if your looking for max rigging nirvana. He is soooo the man.
Renormalize as a final step. For example I have a script that renormalizes the collapsed layers before saving to TGA. You don't need to normalize each layer, just the result of all the layers.
Try this one : http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/modeling/c/search?search=xyShrinkWrap&x=19&y=20 if you can't get the other one to work.
Yeah you could script it quite easily. Have a look in the Maxscript help or turn on the Macro Recorder and enable all the callbacks. It'll show up the relevant commands in the listener window.
yeah, the eyes have done that since HL2. they can be scripted to look at specific objects. TF2 added more advanced facial animations to go with it. that's why the faces are so high density.
We use the free mGear rigging tools to do that. It does have a script to save skinweights. And take a look at ngskintools 2.0 https://www.ngskintools.com/v2/launch-status/
Not sure if you are willing to drop some money onto a script or not, but Rappatools has something called Inbetweeninstances Amongst other great features. http://remusjuncu.com/rappatools/index.html