So I'm currently a student and I have access to some awesome graphics editors. What is *currently* the best NIF editor? What does Bethesda use? I've had major trouble getting the Blender NIF scripts to work, so I was wondering if either Maya or a particular version of 3DSMax would be better. Is there a program that has support for NIF format by default? Any help would be appreciated!

Don't know how it is as an editor, but as a viewer and tweaker Nifskope is good
I use it to assign glow maps to meshes

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifTools

Blender has the best support.

Max's hasn't been updated in almost a year, but is fully functional.

Support for Maya svcks.

Depends how fond you are of a decent UI.

Blender's UI is horrible. Max's, less so.

Well what in the world does Bethesda use? In house stuff?