Hey all, did you know it's very easy to change Maya's user interface?
It's everything written in MEL (there's a ton of scripts) and you can find them in a folder that is located somewhere like this: MAYADIR\scripts\others

As a character rigger, I usually do the paint bind skin process a LOT. And since I'm not a math genius to write an automatic-surface-recognition-skin-cluster, I only did a little change to the original Paint Skin Weights Tool and added an influence filter.
That's right, no new pop-up menus to mess up my workspace. I just added a text field to filter out my influences.

Here's the full influence list:

And here's the filtered influence list:

You can also have multiple filters at the same time, very handy.

If you wanna try customizing yours too, it it's very simple. Try taking a look into artAttrSkinProperties.mel and artAttrSkinCallback.mel files.

For the filtering algorithm, python can be really useful:

filter = 'sometext'
listToBeFiltered = ['notext', 'sometext_here', 'alotoftext']

for eachWord in listToBeFiltered:
    if filter in eachWord: print 'We have a winner!', eachWord, 'contains', filter

I think I'll be adding some features for locking weights and such. Have fun!

:D