Aye, good idea monster. This might also help (have used it successfully in the past): http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/vertex-normals-stitcher
Autodesk needs to spend a dev cycle and work on the tools that allow you to edit normals and incorporate some of the ideas behind these scripts and give people some out of the box tools, so they can work around these issues without so much hack-a-dash...