A start on the .MESH file format

[alpaca]

You could say the same for all the fiels which are now .string.bins, and which alpaca has made a converter for.

Nah they were just converted into a format that could be read more quickly by the machine.
The game was probably developed without thinking of modding to any large extent (except for some individuals, such as Caliban and Palamedes) and therefore the designers and programmers just used what yielded the best results in the shortest time possible.

Now it seems that we won't get any more official tools any time soon (maybe Caliban can explain why?) I'm glad to see that you guys are making quite a good deal of progress on this, and even more, provide us with a possible free way of editing models
I wish I had more time on my hands so I could work a bit on this, too. Anyways, after you cracked this customer, you should also have a look at the settlement packages (it seems there's some cool stuff in there and it's a lot more flexible than RTW)