In case anyone interested in using Blender had missed this, I believe that both my human and my horse scripts fail to import the skeletons properly and thus can't do rigging. Before picking them up again, I decided to see if anything had changed on the publically available front, and I was pleasantly surprised to find:
On the Blender forums, just a week ago, someone posted an
SMD importer for Blender 2.44 and above. Little commentary thus far because it's so recent, but it sounds solid - down to prompting you to make sure the texture graphics mentioned in the SMD file are all present (it needs them in the same dir as the SMD file), that sort of thing. Turns the SMD rigs into vertex groups (the good way to rig in Blender).
And over on the ModDB forums, the long-seemingly-abandoned
SMD exporter which I used as the basis for my own script seems to have been revived just a month ago. He now claims to have it working through functionality like exporting animations (scabbards, anyone?).
I have not tested either. But if this is the case, then the promise of full (and easy) Blender support may finally be here! Yay!