in despite a lot of efforts to have tools for making music with pd, there's no way to make something smooth enough to be commercial, unless cheating with some steinberg or direct x stuff,
That doesn't seem strange to me: I guess all the sound processing involved in creating _fullu_ "commercial"-sounding stuff would be quite complicated to implement natively in Pd and probably too cpu-expensive - anybody correct me if I am wrong.
But I wonder how this can be different in Max (note that I don't know Max at all (almost))
i cannot comment on max, but comparing the implementations of supercollider's unit generators and pd's tilde objects shows a big different in the handling of parameter changes. pd uses new parameters instantly, while supercollider does a one-block interpolation, so it should sound `smoother'.