I didn't skip any part of your post - it's really much simpler than you're making it.  Any reasonable person looking at my mesh would recognize that it derives from Ascaron's design (hopefully) - whether I put any label on it is not of any importance.  You don't have to be a lawyer to read and interpret copyright law, it is very plainly worded.  So is "fair use", and freely distributing a piece of work that is essentially an outright copy of someone else's copyrighted work does not fall within fair use.  Legally and ethically, I can't distribute this mesh at all without Ascaron's permission.  I can show some sample images of my work, which falls under fair use doctrine pretty plainly - but I can't pass around the model.  I encourage any who who have not read the public information on copyright.gov to do so, this stuff is not rocket science.

Again, just because a lot of people do this in conflict with the way copyright law reads in plain English, and just because some entities fail to enforce it for whatever reason, does not mean it is legal or ethical to distribute derivative works without explicit permission from the copyright holder!  Since Ascaron gave me a tentative OK before I even started this model (yes I actually asked them in advance) I have every expectation that they will allow it - but if they decline, well, it's their intellectual property.  In any case I've learned some valuable modeling and rigging technique that I will use to my own benefit on other projects.

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