So I started looking at what it would take. Can someone give me the quick and dirty on these ExMeshes? Does this mean I should not modify the base mesh at all for an armor set? Just map the texture and then add mesh via the ex?
Ok,Quick and Dirty, I love it that way

first of all, like Phan said, there is not really such thing as "Ex meshes" this are actually, meshes with a material that is called Ex[material], for example, ExChest, ExCalf, Exhand, etc.
To explain it, I would make a compartition between the forearm material, and the Exforearm...
If you look at any vanilla armor set, the forearm material of the armor has its UV mapped to the same location of the UV map for the naked Forearm material, this is important for armor that let the skin be seen, since the game will overlap the amor forearm texture image over the naked texture image, if they don't have the UV mapp in the sampe place and the same shape... well, the result will be a mess.
this is well explained in this
wiki articleNow, what that article don't really explain is how the ExForearm material will work in game, it just say it is used for alpha, but it has another importance, when you equip a chest with long sleeves, like the green cloth set, the ExForearm, ExMidarm, get removed to avoid clipping. So depending on the armor type, "chestlong", "cheststandard", etc. defined by the Wardrobe.dat file, the different materials with the Ex preffix will be hidden or not. So keeping the Ex materials where they should be, is important, not for the full armor to work since it will work anyway, but for the pieces to work well with other armor pieces.
here is a pic I found with the some Ex material shown as guidelines:

The vanquisher's boots are typically thigh-high. In the original, it was always funny if your boots didn't match your armor that you could end up with the top half of the buckled set, and the lower part be the spiked. If I could control what ExMesh goes with what piece of armor, I could fix the mismatch issue. How faithful to the originals would you want it? I mean, I can do some projection texture mapping and copy a lot of the original textures. Or we could do a "in the same spirit" and throw some better textures at it, just retaining the same color scheme and basic shapes. Really I think as long as you do the base mesh, most of the others are based on that with only little modifications. Helmets and shoulders should transfer easily.
Well, I don't know what the others think, but the ones I make are mix in between faithfull and in the same spirit. Like you said helmet and shoulder are mostly the same, I found some issues with some of the Vanquisher ones, cause of the hair, but I just replaced the hair with a fitting TL2 hairstyle. For the rest of the body a search for "matching" pieces from other sets and just retexture them, I choose this way to have the mesh quality be around the same as the vanilla sets, because some models from TL1 really look crappy, and with weird UV mapping, and also you need a way to make it easy to adapt one model to the male and female body... (Male vanquisher wear skinpy suits and tall boots too

)
Here is something I whipped together in just a couple hours just to try a few things. Obviously its not exact, and I modified the base mesh on the arms for the gloves.
And what you there works great
