“Wow! COLLADA is so great!” were my first words about COLLADA, after a brief research made 
. But devil is in the details. COLLADA is a nice format that can store everything, let me emphasize, everything. I have use it for quite some time, its good when you use the same DCC tool and the same exporter for DAE, but when that DAE comes from various DCC tools and also exporters, things get nasty, of course it can be an escuse for a lame importer, but still, the format is too loose for game development at least, and now I’m limited at exporting only the mesh data, skeletons get complicated a little, etc., so in a moment of “professional rage” I have started an open source game asset file format specification and its exporters for MAX, Maya and XSI, plus a simple import/load library, called .GSCENE , found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gscene (work in progress of course).
If you dont believe me about COLLADA, then start using it, good luck