A kind soul gave me some pascel code that can read in the NIF format and place the data into tables. I wasn't able to do anything past this as my cousin, sadly, moved away and he had the windows computer that I could experiment with. The file format is pretty easy as all the data headers are in plain text and tell what the data block is. I only run linux now. But I'm sure with the Marrowind community, AC3D doing NIFs would be a godsend.
Here's the pascel code and a windows executable that displays the info. The code itself in nicely commented. I have permission from the original aurthor to do what I will with the code. I give it you you guys.
Have fun.
Here is the zip file.
Addundim:
I can probably dig out some example files somewhere. If not, you could always downlad a mod and take a few .NIFs from that to play with.