Well arn't we high and mighty!
Exporting from max to dark game sdk in .x format is fairly painless with pandasofts exporter - a little tweeking is needed for bone animations, but its not too hard.
Now though, what I'd be conserned about is dark sdk's lack of a good graphics engine. It sucks, a fair bit (slow, buggy graphics functions, bad to no shader support). Normal maps, for instance, are easyer to implement in ogre than they are in dark sdk! Me, I'm headed for ogre as soon as I have finnished my first (and most likely only) dark sdk project.