It seems to me you might not understand all that well, the modifier system is something that’s very useful and is one of the big advantages. And one of the things that people have chosen for is the ability to customize.
There’s nothing serious that 3ds is lacking as a 3D program, it sounds ridiculous to say that Maya is a “true” 3D workflow and that you can’t do real 3D with 3ds . There’s an immense amount of work done in 3ds that proves you wrong. There’s a few things it doesn’t have that you have to buy plugins for, but that’s the same with Maya.
That doesn’t matter for game development because none of those things can be used with games.