i'm getting closer and closer. i realized tonight that biturn will export the RUAA as "old" lightwave and have a perfect battle pose mesh. then i also realized that biturn will export the RUAA as "new" lightwave and have a perfect skeleton but f'd up mesh. but they're not joined! so i deleted the f'd up mesh and transposed the skeleton from the "new" file onto the mesh from the "old" file. and i have this!
combined tifa on the left, my attempt at importing individual meshes and assembling her from scratch on the right.
now it's "just" a matter of weighting the mesh to the bones and de-posing her back to A or T, and i should be in business! and now that i have a process, the other characters will be super easy.