The forum ate my first reply, so forgive me if this comes off more terse than intended.
If you need to qualify “reasonable” like this, then you are already planning for it to not be reasonable, either by high upfront cost, or a subscription model (implied by the “professional support” line). I know that I don’t want either of these options, as 3ds Max support should be a basic engine feature.
Quite frankly, FBX sucks as a transfer format. All of my assets are created/modified in 3ds Max and they always take multiple attempts and tweaks to get them into the engine properly (and most of the time, there are still discrepancies between the two). UV maps will be wrong, scale will be way off, materials will be missing or broken, vertices will be collapsed or separated (causing visible gaps), etc. I have wasted so much time because of this and if you have a native 3ds Max importer that works, then it needs to be rolled into the engine period.
I don’t know why this is getting rolled in and treated the same as the CAD capabilities. Yes, 3ds Max gets used in arch viz and product visualization, but it also gets used (quite a bit) in game development. I’m sure that plenty of game devs would love the capability of creating their levels completely in 3ds Max and use them in UE4, without having to worry about FBX corruption issues. If it is a matter of licensing cost (there was mention of a licensed component used for the CAD conversions, but nothing on the 3ds Max side), then please call that out, as that would at least be understandable.
Tell that to those of us fending for ourselves in some of the private subforums. I’m not complaining (much, see my PS4 postmortem thread), but plenty of us get by just fine with little to no support, even when dealing with un/underdocumented or just flat out broken features.
At least give us a source code only solution, with basic documentation (this is effectively an import plugin for crying out loud, how much documentation does it really need?). Let us compile it into the engine ourselves and crowdsource support. You already have this mechanism via UDN, where developers can pay for support if they need/want it.
Of course, this assumes that the plugin works… 