After avoiding Milkshape for almost two decades, i finally decided to find a way to work with meshes in either Blender or Maya. I started with Blender and found lovely Blender plugin for SMD by Bobcatben, only to realize it's as outdated as Milkshape.
Valve offered brand new .smd plugin for version 2.8 onward but it cannot import Sims .smd for whatever reason (import doesn't fail but imports nothing regardless).
Then i found MESA, Source Engine script for all x64 Maya versions. It's...quite something. The script has so many importing/exporting preferences for various Source Engine variables, and it does import Sims .smd with initially keyed bones and mesh bind to it that can be edited, but I'm yet to figure out exporting preferences that would work for Sims. Has anyone worked with it yet, or generally with SMD in Maya? Considering importing is more then successful, and with it, so many possibilities that open in Maya, I'm interested in exploring this more.

I don't know much about Maya or the .smd plugin other than that it is outdated and I never managed to get it working, but there is a way to work directly with Sims 2 mesh files in Blender.
There are two plugins available here on MTS, one for Blender 2.80+ made by DjAlex88 and an older one for Blender 2.79 made by me. I would probably recommend the one made by DjAlex88, unless you still prefer Blender 2.79 over the more recent versions.

They're not perfect and are bound to have some small issues with possibly raw python error messages popping up when you make a mistake, but they should work on any Sims 2 mesh with maybe the exception of head meshes.

For Maya,if you prefer the tools and work flow in the program, you can do the workaround where you make the main mesh (using a TS2 body as a template so you get vertices in the right position for animation and connection with the neck), export as an OBJ, and then use steps from a TS3/TS4-to-TS2 tutorial to auto-add bone assignments.

You can also use Maya for making object meshes that don't have bone assignments, or use it for the main meshing parts and do the finishing bits & pieces with mesh adjustments (size and/or bone assignments) in either Blender or Milkshape. I used to do that with a different program, because Milkshape is a pain to mesh anything from scratch in.

These days I mostly mesh in Blender, but I'm not too happy with the workflow (probably should check out the newer versions, I guess - I hear the UI is a lot better. The version that works with S4Studio for conversions and stuff can be a pain... Good thing you can have several versions working alongside each other)

Thank you very much for the plugin, i was searching for it to no end, but Google doesn't really like ts2! I will give it a go these days and see if some errors pop up

Thank you very much for all this info, this is really a good method to do with Maya + Blender, and honestly, maybe even smoother then figuring out Source Engine MESA. I haven't even thought about option of assigning weights afterwards in Blender, which has excellent weighting tools. Now that i know it's part of s4t2 process, I will look into it so i can pick much needed rigging details ty again