I've been reading through the COLLADA importer, and it's parsing through all this useful information, like the unit to meters conversion factor. However, the accessor for that is on the collada importer object (not static), and there is no static accessor to get at it. Further, there is no static accessor to get at the singleton instance, either.
In general, are you supposed to go through the static functions, or are you supposed to go through the object interface itself? It feels like I'm going schizophrenic trying to figure that one out 
In general, I like it when you don't use static instances, because if you needed to load lots of models, and you had lots of cores on your CPU, you could parallelize the work.
You could almost use the object as-is, except the non-static load() function is private. Hence, I see no way of getting at the meters metric (or other such information such as the model info string).
Good point. ColladaImporter went from object -> singleton -> object during its lifespan, and a few things got dropped on the way. I'll add some proper accessors for you.
Thank you very much!
You know, it may be awhile before anything I do will be checked back into the community. So, I would recommend just using the getInstance and accessing the getters for units and the like. I've started cleaning up the static vs. object stuff a bit locally, but as I mentioned it may take awhile to get it in.