Maya's component editor really sucks because of that lock thing. It really slow my workflow so I usually deal with the export / import to SI and work there my weighting.
But when I can, I skin my model in Maya before sending it to SI, because it has a much better default weighting than SI and Maya bones are easier to deal with when you do game assets (and FBX convert them nicely into nulls when importing). With proper settings you can use the default Maya weights for a test model where precise weights aren't needed. SI weights are pretty much useless, not even for a mob or test character. You need to re-weight almost everything manually, and if you work with nulls, it is even worst. I haven't used yet that heat skin or whatever from newer Maya versions but it looks cool. (I only use old versions for work) Martin Sent from my iPhone > Maya has great things for it, but binding and weighting is definitely not one > of them. It's pretty bad, actually. Ok, rant off.
