i -have- read Kva3's guide but I'm still having trouble with legs and chest and stuff, so I just want someone to talk with about who can straighten out the edges, so to speak.

Are you using Blender?

I learned a something that has really sped up my process.
I was just about to do this for an armor set I was working on so I will take some screen grabs.

This is for TL1, but it should be similar for TL 2.

I keep a base mesh that already is rigged and weighted the way I want.

Then I copy that mesh to be my new base for an armor class.



I hadn't parented the new mesh to the bones yet.



Several pieces have not been weighted yet.





I almost always use the mode that only weight paints what I have selected.


Now the new armor piece and the base mesh move together.


This technique usually does a pretty good job.  Occasionally I have to go in and do some tweaking after the fact. But even in those cases, this saves me a ton of work.

I hope this helps!

Update: I went ahead and turned this into a video.

indeed, i'm going to use your video as a definite reference while doing this~

However I've run into a completely unrelated issue! xD

I'm trying to convert some models and I'm running into this terrible problem where when i'm trying to export as .mesh I get an error that boils down to 'Cannot export charmap'

Now I've tried to remove the material, add a new one and replace the texture, the problem is that now the texture is missing a piece, and adding it back in creates the texture to overlap where it shouldn't, I'll update this post with screen grabs to show what I'm talking about.

But, the problem is now with having a model that includes a charmap, and trying to break that down into 5 models from 1~