when I make a cylinder for example and I extrude a cap face, the polygons have no assigned smoothing polygons where as the original polygons are assigned to 4. It's not that much of a problem, just a huge annoyance when modeling. does anyone know how to fix?
You could try doing the "Grow" command on your selection (with the freshly extruded polygon selected) so it'll select all the new polygons that have no smoothing group. Then, just simply autosmooth or assign smoothing groups or whatever