As forum poster Chosen Few helpfully noted:

After the initial posting, cooler heads prevailed, including Gaia Clary, who’s the Blender/JASS/Primstar maven at Machinimatrix. And then Domino Marama weighed in – the creator of the scripts that so many Second Life creators have relied on (both free and paid versions).

Re: Blender dropping COLLADA Reply to Chosen Few – Chosen Few wrote: Nothing’s been decided yet, so nobody panic yet. If worse comes to worst, and the Blender devs do cease official support for COLLADA, I’m sure enterprising SL residents will just create their own COLLADA exporter for Blender, and release it to the public, just like they did for the excellent sculpty tools that so many Blender users now enjoy.

Are you looking over my shoulder? Oddly just before this issue came up, I’d just started digging into the Blender code to fix some Collada bugs. I do tend to agree that the current implemention in Blender is awkward and in the long term best replaced. So instead of fixing bugs, I’ve started on a Python implementation of a Collada exporter. And getting it working for SL is the first priority – it’ll be free to all Primstar 2 and Avastar owners – I hope to have it ready before Collada support is dropped from Blender :smileyhappy: – Dominic Marama

via Blender dropping COLLADA support – Second Life

As I very rashly bought, downloaded, and managed to install Blender 2.61 with the JASS/Primstar-2 add-on, I guess I now have a duty and responsibility to wrap my head around it and actually make sculpts with it. Trouble is, no matter how many times I take classes, watch videos, and make notes, I remain deeply confused about it. However, last night I did make some progress with the help of some of Gaia’s new help videos, and some things that had plumb eluded me started to sort out a little in the basket of cute, fluffy kittens tangled adorably in sparkly yarn that is my brain.

I also took a pretty helpful class Tuesday night at Builder’s Brewery, which I had hoped to repeat Thursday, but it was cancelled… I’ll keep an eye on the class schedules and keep reading the many class materials I’ve gathered but left unread in my inventory.

I’ll just… follow some of the other helpful suggestions out there.