EmiElissi

I doubt the SL devs even care anymore. As Cathy said in one of her videos, the Mesh Deformer was in beta for 2 years, and Fitted Mesh for a couple of months, and LL decided to rush out the Fitted Mesh Project, which has been disastrous to SL ever since. The new starter mesh avatars are proof of this. They are probably the #1 reason at turning away new players. Just imagine being a newbie. You see some clothing, so you put it on, and then your avatar looks like the first pic in the original post. What a disaster! There isn't a uniform standard for avatar clothing and attachments, which makes SL look like a patchwork of a mess. There's the old default avatar and clothing. The new default mesh avatars and clothing. The UV skins & clothing. The standard-sizes mesh clothing. The Fitted Mesh avatars and clothing. If they can't even get this straightened out for SL, i don't have high hopes for SL 2.0, which is why i'm hoping another virtual world comes out and wakes LL up. I've only been in SL/OS virtual worlds for around 2 years total, but even i recognize how much of a disaster this has been to SL. Since LL will never standardize and clean up this mess, it's up to the creators and vendors to do it. If only they could collectively settle on a standard, and discontinue the old freebies and old clothing (which have been around since 2007), SL would be a much better place for new players and content creators. The solution in the original post would be so wonderful for SL, but then it would also add even more confusion to the Frankenstein-patchwork that is SL.

This isn't possible to do. SL doesn't allow importing particles, so you would have to create that fur with particles, then somehow convert them to mesh (polygons), then texture them with fur textures. The only other way, from what i know, is to make flexi-prims within SL using their build tool, but that would lag too much, and it's highly discouraged due to script/prim count in regions.

These are some of the best tutorials for getting started. These are truly the basics. You don't have to do the exercises if you don't want, and you can just choose the videos without them.

Ugh, i know how you feel OP. All the mesh bodies are too limiting in choice. I really wish the "mesh deformer" project would've prevailed, because it was far superior, allowing us to use the default avatar without having to worry about appliers, huds, alphas, etc.