mysql sequence emulation - problem

i was using the mysql sequence emulation a lot of times and i realized, that this extra table " *_seq " makes problems, whenever you i.e. switch a table from using auto_increment to use the sequence emulation, then you have to set the value in the table *_seq to the proper value by hand or if you update an application to use sequences from now on, you have to watch out, to set the sequence number properly by hand why not simply select the "max" value from the table that the nextId needs to be generated for and let the "nextId" return this "max value +1" ? what do you think?? or was there already a discussion in that, which i missed? -- Wolfram