I have had bad experiences with Collada too. I'm stuck with the skins. I'm making my own interpreter for that format since I'm using Delphi, and the libraries for Collada are in C++, I think I'll have to go thru the painful way of translating C code to Pascal. On the other hand, I haven't found any good article about skinning that could help me.

Anyway, when I had questions about Collada, I asked this guy:
glaforte@feelingsoftware.com

I think they are the creators of the official Max plugin.