So I learned what my problem was I'm 99% sure, and know how to ask the question a lot better now. The problem with trying to merely shrink the scale of some naturally massive creature, is AFAIK it's collision mesh will not shrink with the rest of the creature. So... Is blender required to do this, or is Nifskope capable of solving this dilemma? If Blender is required then... Could I possibly just remove the collision as a last resort?

(I also tried to use Blender months ago, perhaps several months ago for other things, and while I managed to quite easily remodel a specific creature, the bone weight copy script, and everything to do with bone weight, horribly confused me, resulting in me, ceasing to use Blender out of confused frustration).

I think you can scale the collision along with the skeleton.nif in Nifskope by scaling the base BSFadeNode. I loaded a cow into Nifskope and the collision shows up as being scaled along with the rest of the cow skeleton.nif.

I noticed that the collision is a collection of capsule shapes rather than the type of collision used for statics and such.

I'm also using this fork of Nifskope that shows the collision in green.

https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/releases/tag/v1.2.0-alpha.2

actually, the creature's collision itself should scale with it.

what does _not_ shrink with it though might be it's idea of how broad a navmesh it needs - like when you path test a navmesh with different types of creatures, you can see your green line depends a lot on the type of creature you test on.

i'm not sure if, where and how this can be set now, but you can for one thing set size (small, medium, large iirc) in a creature's race, so i guess that'd be as good a place to try as any

might be wrong, but iirc scaling 0 node doesn't take over in game

You are probably right. I didn't try loading the scaled cow into the game. But would just the collision be ignored in-game?