that's a cool tut poop, but it's sad how people make tuts after you've learned and mastered those tricks I remember I got interested into smoothing groups watching some of eoin colgan's artworks, he really makes a cool use of'em http://eoincolgan.com/ Good work!
I've been using max since it was in DOS, and I agree that numbering faces is not an intuitive way to work. Edges make more sense. But yes, max does allow each face to use more than one group, so the application of that is when you set 2 groups on the faces that border the termination of a crease, so then the crease fades…