Haye Abbott

Many people in all sorts of content have that content as a sideline and can therefore afford to give things away for promotional purposes. Also, in Second Life, I'm sure we'll be seeing lots of people putting up cheap videogame ripped meshes.

Might have non triangles, or some sort of metadata that isn't supported. What program are you exporting your DAE files from?

Well, the exporter is supposed to take care of that, but the fewer steps you leave to the exporter the more that narrows it down. Maybe try exporting a single link and see if it still hangs up on import?

Are all the faces triangles? Are there any modifiers that might have caused a problem with the export of the model? Does the DAE file load back into Blender properly?

I don't read German, but it seems you have the option to include joint positions checked; in that case, if the imported model doesn't have bones all weighted segments will be centered on the origin.

Do the mesh and the physics hull have the same bounding box?

Why not harm the existing platform? The existing platform is horrible, and some harm to it would do everyone good.

It would be nice if you could overlay a lightmap/occlusion texture over a tiled texture. That way you could get away with a much less detailed baked texture since the tiled texture would handle the details.