Demo: engine.xogames.org/demo_skinning/
During development of my just-for-fun game engine I needed to add support for skinned mesh animations.
I decided to take collada as intermediate format and make a script that converts collada into a custom binary format.
It was really a lot of work (mostly with collada parsing and exporting).
My plan was to make debug draw for the CPU skinning and then transfer it to the GPU. And it finally worked.