I hear you. The issue here is actually that Max (and other Autodesk products like Maya and now Arnold) reset the affinity once we’ve overridden it. You can watch along in Task Manager as I believe the Sandbox (not listed in your earlier tests) still has the desired affinity set even once Max start, and during Max’s startup you’ll see it go from the Deadline-set affinity back to all cores. I’ve definitely done so with Maya, and core-code is involved here so it will be the same mechanism for the majority of applications that Deadline starts up.
I’ve bumped the dev team again for you. It’s difficult for this to gain priority mainly because the number of companies affected by it is low. Usually it is only those who are using their workstations to render projects during working hours.