I think the reasoning generally stems from a lack of knowledgeable people. If you think about it, most teams have mentors that are familiar with certain aspects of the team, whether it be CAD, Machining, business or what ever. However, I do not know of a team (though I'm sure there are at least a few) that have mentors that work with 3DsMax in their jobs.
Our animation team (2 years ago when we actually still had one) consisted of 3 people who had no idea what they were doing, even after managing a few simple clips, no one really knew how we were going to come up with an animation idea and then create it, on top of that no one could find the rules for the animation stuff and later found out that we had passed the deadline anyways.
Personally, I think they would get more entries for the animation if they allowed the use of other software as well (at a teams own expense of course), in my experience I've found 3DsMax is NOT very user friendly when compared with other options out there.
In the general scheme of things, I think when teams prioritize, they look at animations as a secondary objective, and if they're not even sure if they're going to be able to finish one, why even try? Not the best attitude but unless you have a team with like 50 people, it's the reality of the competition.
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