Current working Model Editing proceedures

[HereInPlainSight]

A couple months back I and my esteemed artist cohort learned how to edit, change, and swap skins on models. This was good, but we wanted more, we wanted to take the next step and edit models. We looked through all the guides in the Guides area, tried a bunch of the apps in the app thread. We keep hitting roadblocks, we can't find a method to extract, edit, and reinject models in a way that works. For example, we found three different programs to use, one to extract the model we wanted, one to convert it to an editable format, one to edit the model, then used the programs all in reverse to covert it back to the original format, then put it back into an MPQ. Now we start up the game with our patch -- we get a hovering model, or a really freaky looking spiky ball that you can kind of see is obeying commands, like sit or move, but it's still a spiky ball instead of the actual modified model.

Somewhere, something's not right. Does anyone know what programs currently work to do model modification? We don't know where the failure is, it could be the model extraction, the program used for converting or the one for editing. So throwing all that out. Does anyone have a list of programs that work as of the current patch to do all that?

We have the technology, we have somewhat the know-how, we just need to know what the known good programs are for these things.