How to export skinned creatures

I'm trying to make a skeleton-animated squid. I created a custom skeleton
structure for this purpose. The mesh is skinned, and all ok so far. But
when trying to export it, I receive many kinds of errors. Here are the
details:

The skeleton has the following structure:

SquidRoot
...TentacleAa
......TentacleAb
.........TentacleAc
............TentacleAd
...............TentacleAe
..................TentacleAf
...TentacleBa
......TentacleBb
.........TentacleBc
............TentacleBd
...............TentacleBe
..................TentacleBf
...TentacleCa
etc.


The skin modifier has been applied, including all the bones.

So far I had seen in the max2dts docs how to make a simple (non-animated)
shape, and also how to make a character animated with bones.

What I cannot understand yet is what are the technical requirements
(exporter constraints?) to make successfully something like my squid. All
attempts I have done (mixing the directions given in the "SimpleShape" approach
and the directions given in the "Player" example) have been unsuccessful.
And neither the docs nor the forum seem to have the required info.
Has somebody have luck doing something similar to what I want to do?

For example, my last approach was:

Create a tentacle, add the bones, add the skin. In the schematic view I can
see the bone hierarchy and the mesh hierarchy. If I try to export this, I
get the "No data to export" error message. Then, remembering the
SimpleShape example, I tried to "Embed the shape" button, but that generated
the "skin must be unlinked" error message, while also noticing a "detail-1"
node was generated. Then I unlinked the mesh, and then start getting the "no
details to export" error.

After that, I remembered that SimpleShape uses really "SimpleShape2" as mesh
name, so I modified the mesh name to "Squid2" and the "detail-1" to
"detail2". And I though that was the winner move... just to realize
that I got (again??!!) the "no details to export". So I started checking the
hierarchy posted with the Player example, then I realized that detail nodes
are attached to the root bone. So I did just that. I disposed of base01 and
start01 nodes, and linked detail2 to SquidRoot and, I got, guess what? : "no
data to export" (again!!!).

One direction I read was to use the same bones names as in the Player
example. But, in my case, I don't understand WHY I should do that, neither
which naming convention I can follow, given that my squid doesn't follow at
all a human-like skeleton, and then it's not clear to me how to make the
"name translation", nor WHAT IS SO IMPORTANT about that bones' names that I
would need to use them.

Thanks for your time! (and possible advices ;-)