in avatar_skeleton.xml sometimes the right bone is listed first, sometimes the left. I matched the data in this spreadsheet to same order as avatar_skeleton.
Instead of just stashing this as a reference, I started using it as a tool. The bone positions fit the default system male a little better than other armatures, for automatic bone weighting, and the bone layers and groups (based on avatar_skeleton.xml 's organization) are easier to use for weight painting than Avastar's armature. So I corrected some of the bone settings to make it work better.
The rebuilt male_2016-08-05.dae armature turns out to be good for auto-weighting and weight painting in Blender, so, rather than a failed experiment, it's a resource. I deleted Blender-generated bone custom properties and anything else that's either useless or might be misleading.
The "broken" armature downloadable from SL Wiki Bento Testing, repaired in this file from data in avatar_skeleton.xml, available in viewer > Character.
New working file (old one corrupted). Started with empty file and appended from old file: references avatar.skeleton.xml, male_2016_08_05.dae and Skeleton.Male with BaseMale mesh, and new working armature and mesh: FittedBentoMale.
TO DO: fix the bone custom properties. So far I've winnowed the problem down: mBones must have rest_mat values, which define the resting bone pose, bind_mat which defines the relationship betwen armature and rigged mesh and is created by Blender (when it's wrong or missing it causes a gap between head and body). I'm still not sure what settings collision bones need; I'm getting a variety of sets of numbers from different ways of Blender can calculate dae exports and imports.
(I think I referred to this new file with reversed name earlier, having a particularly dyslexic day, sorry)
Replacing with "DefaultMaleBentoFitted.blend. The old file got corrupted because it was too big, I think. Blender doesn't manage multiple armatures well.
Left-right mismatches, and I don't know if they're within the rounding tolerances, as I don't know what those tolerances are. One other issue: some left -right pairs are listed with left first, others with right first
Ada Radius