I'm really surprised I haven't heard anything back. I'll share this morning's progress so far.
I've learned that I need to set up a Skeleton, which contains Vector.<SkeletonJoint>. "joint index" is the index in this vector. SkeletonJoint stores the "inverse bind matrix" in a raw Vector.<Number>, and the joint name. I assume that the joint index I need to set into SkinnedSubGeometry nodes are the joint index into Vector.<SkeletonJoint>. I expect that, from here, something drives the Skeleton for animation. Probably SkeletonPose and SkeletonTreeNode (and its subclasses). -Dave