I’m working on getting a skeletal mesh to export cleanly from Maya LT, I know it’s supposed to be FBX 2014, but is there a specific reason to use either Binary or Ascii?
AFAIK, the Binary/Ascii thing is for backwards-compatibility with other versions of Maya. if its set to binary, you can only open the asset with the current or newer versions of Maya. if its set to Ascii, you can open them with older versions of Maya but may run in to errors. Binary files tend to be smaller too.
The .ma files are basically giant text documents. If something ever gets corrupted, you can usually go open it up with something like Notepad++ and actually fix whatever broke the scene. However, they’re larger and take longer to save. The .mb files are smaller and save faster, but they can’t be edited the same way. If a .mb file gets corrupted, you better have a backup. Not really anything to do with what they’re compatible with in terms of current and future versions.
That’s super-useful, thanks guys… for some reason I was assuming there were super-ominous, project-wide ramifications to choosing the wrong format that would sneak up and tackle us halfway through 
I think he’s referring to FBX file compression, not Maya.
There’s not much you can edit in an ASCII FBX file anyway, so I’d say go for binary FBX files to save disk space.