Good advice cartoonjockey; indeed it takes a lot of work, and honestly i do not even know where to start from :)
I was considering the moodels from 3Drt, they seems pretty cheap and their example works fine in Cheetah (but not in blender so far, also because i am still learning blender so probaly could just be my inexperience); otherwise mixamo also has interesting models, but their animations are pricey if you plan to get more than a couple; and at that point i would prefer to get a set of characters like the ones from 3DRT.
I will try to get something working tomorrow and see how feasible is the solution that you mentioned (i have little time and little experience...so i am basically screwed lol)
I don't know if you did a good switch :) programming has very specific restriction so if the customer ask for an exe or dll that does A and B using C and D, you can't mess up too much, but when you are asked to make a model, there could be 100 things that a customer could or would change; so i see it as more stressful....but if you like it enjoy; i prefer much more to deal with quaternions and pointers instead than tris and normals :)