Yea unfortunately abc is a tricky format to work with in max.
Max's own importer/exporter uses outdated methods in the Alembic SDK to do things like matID save/load. Also the way it processes matIDs is broken to begin with. So while its importer "works" with its exporter, it isn't compatible with "properly" exported abc files in some cases. This is probably what you're running into. VRay's Proxy object can import .abc files and does a good job of it. Try to default to that as your importer if possible.
The reason why export isn't working from max's exporter is because you do not have Mesh operators in your flow with "render only" turned off.
As for the large file size, you're not going to get around this with the abc format.
There are some farms that do support recent version of tyFlow. Check/join the tyFlow facebook group for recent discussions about which ones.
Max's own importer/exporter uses outdated methods in the Alembic SDK to do things like matID save/load. Also the way it processes matIDs is broken to begin with. So while its importer "works" with its exporter, it isn't compatible with "properly" exported abc files in some cases. This is probably what you're running into. VRay's Proxy object can import .abc files and does a good job of it. Try to default to that as your importer if possible.
The reason why export isn't working from max's exporter is because you do not have Mesh operators in your flow with "render only" turned off.
As for the large file size, you're not going to get around this with the abc format.
There are some farms that do support recent version of tyFlow. Check/join the tyFlow facebook group for recent discussions about which ones.