Hi,
The information is gathered and a feature request is created.
As the things you propose are mostly name based, there is a workaround for objects I can provide.
For layers - Select child nodes > Add to masking selection (there is still manual selection, but I think this is fine)
For different objects - Max Select from Scene (H hotkey) supports basic wildcards. By default, it searches for objects starting with specified text and is case insensitive, e.g. "Tire" will find "tire", "tire_001", "tire_002_car" etc. If you want to select objects which contain "tire", you can type it with asterisk, e.g. "*tire". After this you can select the needed objects and create a selection set, which you can later add other objects to. In the mask include/exclude list, you can pick the selection set quickly and that's it. Of course this is not ideal and does not work for materials. But I would be more likely to add an object to a layer/set, than to remember to change its name.
(Internal ID=1099962731)