How exactly might one find that point? I thought the vertices were stored in the Mesh class, but I cant seem to actually access them. By a complete translation matrix, do you mean like the combinations of all matrices of the previous joints in the hierarchy? I'll look into your idea again, thanks for the help.
Edit: I was doing something wrong in my code. I was actually finding the Y-axis of the transformation AFTER multiplying the shoulder (I should NOT have done this). After undoing this mistake I have gotten more reasonable results, although I am still more interested in accessing the points of the mesh.