I am much more comfortable with body meshing, as long as it's on the simple side. Bone assignments can be a bitch.
I tend to stick to slight edits and simple conversions for objects, and I never do anything without a tutorial because I worry about messing up my game. I'd like to figure out slots so I could venture a little further, but it seems really over my head. Have you followed along the object meshing tutorial from start to finish on MTS? It's pretty helpful.