There are a few challenges working with Content in XNA.  To say it's an improvement over straight up Managed DirectX is a massive understatement, but still I'm struggling with the content pipeline.

I've posted about these issues before and I really appreciate the great help I've received.  I understand the limitations and even how to get around some of them, but I would love to know how others are handling them. 

Animation.  The Content Pipeline doesn't bring in animation data directly from models.  The data is imported, but not processed.  The Skinning Sample shows how to deal with this, as well as the Animation Library on Codeplex.  What are you doing to bring in animation from your animating tools?

Shader Materials.  XNA (or I guess more accurately FBX and X) doesn't support arbitrary shaders for materials.  I can't have the artist apply some crazy bump mapping shader to a material in a modeling package and have everything brought in by the Content Pipeline.  How are you handling this?  Are you extending the ModelProcessor to load effects based on information in your model and then assigning those effect to your XNA Model objects?

I would appreciate a discussion on what you're doing today to deal with these issues.  XNA (and C#) has gotten me much further than I've ever made it with other games.  I love the framework and am trying to find as much information as possible about it and how people are using it.  There are some pretty big brains out there. :)

If XNA doesn't support animation out-of-the-box, what is the purpose of the AnimationContent class?  The AnimationKeyFrame class?

Is there documentation that I'm missing?  I feel like I'm asking questions that I should be able to find in the documentation.  I don't want to abuse the forum and come off as self-serving.
 

In the animation subject I´m using the Animation importer from CodePlex. So far is working nicely. But I believe that XNA should have that support in it´s base, and some info in the propriety tab, but I think that the XNA creators have that in mind, and the 1.0 release is just a first try out to get the feedback from developers. The up coming release have lots of improvements, like the access to the vertex from a mesh. And slowly our frustrations are resolved.

About the shaders, I didn´t get there yet. The graphics should be the last topic that I will cover.