I was having a look at http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4917 and noticed the meshes used the vanilla bodies. In an attempt to convert a couple, I replaced the branch using the vanilla male upper body with Robert's average upper body. Although this seemed to align pretty well, there appears to be tears in the mesh on the back that expose the skin.http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v510/mattkaine/nifksopetroubles.jpg Using only NifSkope, how would you recommend I fix this? Is there a function that would allow me to make the armor branch bigger? That might do the trick. I can't seem to find anything that addresses this online, so I thought I would ask here. Thanks for your time.

yes there is a function - right click branch with the armour and select transform -> scale it. (or select scale vertices and only change one dimension - slightly better probably)
that may work but is a hacky yucky thing to do IMO. really the only way to properly do it is to use Blender (or other 3ds, gmax etc.) and cut the body to fit properly.
As a better than #1 but not as good as blender is to copy body part chunk(s) from a similar armour rather than the whole upper body; will usually get better result.
Pacific Morrowind

Is Blender easy to understand in terms of importing and exporting meshes? And is there some sort of tutorial that would explain how to cut the body? Thanks.

importing and exporting from Blender is very easy, editing the body is a bit more complicated.
In terms of learning how http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/tutorials/category/15-modeling/... they are awesome. (and there are installation instructions in one of them as well)
Pacific Morrowind