Ok.

I have been doing some research for the upcoming semester of uni. And I know that we will need animation, so I'm currently trying to way up easy implimentation over flexibility.

My current three choices are:

Collada:
I know very little about this format, other than allot of people love it

FBX:
I have done a little bit of experimenting with this. I love how easy it is to get it setup and running, although I am concerned that the closed end of the library might limit my ability to adapt the file format to work with physics interactions inside of my game. I understand that I could write my own phaser rather than use Autodesks, but that kinda defeats the purpose of using FBX, which is easiness.
my goal is to make the system highly facaded interface for any system to hook into, so thats another con of FBX

MD5:
I have done a tiny bit of a look into this, this looks like the same deal in collada, but maybe a little bit more simple, but I am probably wrong.

My main concern is that this unit is known for it's intense work load, so if I choose a format which has too many features and thus take too long to impliment, sure, ill have a fancy animation setup, but I won't have a game. But if I choose something too easy, requirements of the engine which I didn't for see might cause jelly code to occur as I patch and stretch the abilities of the format.

The main things that I believe are essential are:
easy access to the mesh so I can grab individual triangles and do collision detection
control over the rendering, I would like to use a oct tree to free up GPU
animation
ease of creation of file, as in, an exporter from popular 3D modeling software.

What would be good:
the ability to attach things to bones, i.e. to attach a gun to a hand.
animation which was not model specific, i.e. a walk sequence which can be used by all NPC's with the same bone system
animation blending, both blending animation presets + IK caused from physics interactions (second one more of a wish than a requirement)

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So in summary, I need an animation file format which will add some sparkle and added feature to the game, but not one that will take too long to setup, maybe a tutorial as such as this which would speed up development. I am using Windows and GLUT (possibly will impliment DirectX through use of a facade, i.e. all md5/collada/fbx will call a draw triangle / what ever access they need to the rendering interface.
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Thanks for reading, thanks for the help.

#EDIT#
i realize that some of my wants are probably non related to the format, i.e. IK, that's probably done on my end

In the past team members have done the model format systems, but I decided that Ide do some research cus it's probably good to know.

Maybe you could take a look at MS3D ..http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/files/ms3dsdk184.zip
There's a c file under ms3dsdk184.zip\ms3dsdk\specs ..
It expresses how to load datas from the ms3d model files..