New Character Model File Formats

[Mongrel]

besides, OpenGL has pretty small limits on some stack depths

True, but not that small. My Geforce 4 has a modelview stack depth of 32. I doubt that there's a model that would need more than that.

The main advantage of this is, that you're doing all the transformations in hardware and hardware processing = goooooood. Of course, you could also write a vertex shader for this. Isn't very hard with GLslang and works with Geforce 3+.