3D Mesh Modding Practically Impossible due to Plugins

[Dealman]

The last few days I've been getting into modding for Steel Division and have managed to create my own division as well as add 2 new units to the game - using the Nashorn and Elefant files available in the Steel Division: Normandy 44 Modding Assets.

It took a while to find all the necessary files to be edited but after a lot of errors in French, DirectX crashes and searching for references with Notepad++ I managed to figure it out.

Great! Now that I've got that figured out, I wanted to try and actually implement a mesh of my own into Steel Division. This however doesn't seem to be possible at the moment because;

1. The plugin installers ONLY work for 3ds Max 2010 and 2015.
2. 3ds Max 2010 and 2015 are no longer possible to download with a Student License.
3. Even when installed on 2010 - I can't get the NDFConverter.mds to run - or at least I can't figure out how to start the actual exporter.

I'm grateful for this game supporting modding - but having to rely on such old and out-dated tools for software we can't even get just... doesn't get us anywhere.

Has anyone found a workaround? Will these ever be updated?