@Slacker

I see your point, but in the end as we really need ALL of these features, maybe a better way to decide the best priority is to think about how each of these affects development.

I would say we need the lighting/shadows first, as you generally need to develop the look of your game through several iterations over time. Also if you want to make a demo to raise funding or attract team members, the look of your graphics is going to be very important, so again lighting/shadows is key to have early.

It's not fair to say there is an off-the-shelf method for soft-shadows if you are referring to Sphere as I pointed out previously it's unfortunately not suitable in a lot situations.

Animation in contrast can be fully created in Max or Blender etc. and just exported as vertex anims or bones without weighting, until weighted anims becomes supported. Same for decals, they are perfectly workable as is until a better system arrives. In short it's going to be much easier to have your art style/lighting finalised from early on and then updating animation and decals later on. Trying to do the reverse will be problematic.