Okay, if I've been working on an object made up of several different poly objects all put together, and I want to have maya recognize them as one solid object, what do I do? I know I can group them but I don't want to have to access the hypergraph and choose the group every time I want to move the object around, I want to just be able click any part of the object and have it select the whole thing. But I still want to be able to break it back up individually if I need to change certain parts. Is there any way to do that?
Yes go to root node selection mode instead of leaf selection mode!
You can also use the Polygons->Combine command which will combine all your selected poly objects into one shape node under one transform node. I'd only recommend doing this if you're sure you won't be editing the shape anymore, or doing anymore texturing. Even then you should keep a backup file of the state before the combine. As, while it's certainly not impossible, it's a real pain to undo using the Edit Polygons->Seperate command. This can also make your scene lighter as Maya is dealing with less nodes.
Hope this helps.
-James
Not realy. Bsides it is crtainly possible to put many shapes under one transform, and it doesnt dspeed up anything! Realy! naither does making a combine. THere would need to be a totaly massive poly object for you to notice that!
um,... what can I say other than I have first-hand experience with this. Yes I know you can put many shapes under one transform, but that's still a lot of nodes to deal with. Nodes that the average user probably doesn't even know are there much less have any need to mess around with. You're left with all the shapes and one transform. By combining you're left with one shape node and one transform node. And you're right that it's not a significant amount unless it's very large. But when you DO get really large it makes a great difference.
I learned this while helping to make a film-res amazon rainforest flythrough with a 180 FOV so there was no way to cheat anything. We had to do this just to get the scene to a workable/renderable size. We cut the file size down from about 1Gig to 400Meg. Which meant we were actually able to load the file for rendering with minimal Virtual Memory swapping.
While I think the option of just grouping objects and dealing with pickWalking up to the group node is probably the best bet for this poster (or making a control object to move the whole thing around) I wanted to present another possibility. Personally I always have problems working in heirarchy select mode like you suggest, even though it does satisfy the posters request. But maybe that's the way I set things up.
-James
Well yeah your amazonscene would have been a job for renderman and ribgens! 
or mentalray equalient!
Oh how I wish,... We don't always get the tools we need,... :-7 But that project is one of the main reasons I keep telling people that you can get good results out of the default Maya Software Renderer. You just need a good texturer and lighter who know how to deal with it.
But now I'm offtopic,...
-James
Yeah i agree... most of the guys that say its bad couldnt get deecentlookig renders at deecent rendertimes on any rendrer so.
I mena mayas renderer is MEGA roboust. I mean it can easily be taken out to realy long long journeys. But you need to know your stuff.
Besides, if you start looking at using mentalray or prman at any hc levell you need to know most of that stuff nayway to get the power ot of the renderers.
it's a real pain to undo using the Edit Polygons->Seperate command
Could you expand on that a little? I haven't done much with it, but the separate command has been really handy for me when I import objects from other programs. Is it generating quirky artifacts or extraneous data that are going to bite my arse later?
No big worries. It's more of an orginizational pain in the @$$ than anything else. All the individual object names are lost when you combine an object. When they're seperated out they just get generic numeric names. And you have to eyeball identify pieces and type in the names. If you've got a lot of objects that you combined the re-organization can take hours.
While I have sometimes run into gemetry artifacts with it (reversed normals, non existent geometry, faces with just wireframes and no actual surface) I haven't been able to narrow down the particular cause of said artifacts. These occured when getting a file from a 3rd party that came from another program as an obj or a dxf. These probably came from a CAD program of some sort, and were easily fixed by either asking for the file again, in a different format, exporting the corrupted data as a different format and reimporting, or just fixing the problem by hand.
But all of these problems are instantly obvious upon importing. If your geometry looks good it probably is.
Hope this helps.
-James