Now I feel bad for slowing up my current pet project by getting bogged down writing polygon collision detection when axis aligned bounding boxes would have done for prototyping. (I'm not as quick as Notch!)
My understanding is that usually you want both because AABB is good for broad-phase because it's so quick then true polygon collision can be done in a narrow phase.
Interesting. I've recently set aside a ThreeJS project. I'm not a math wiz but even with Three, you still need some idea about matricies, vectors and even quaternions. The way you're "supposed" to do collision detection with Three is with raycasting, so more fun with vectors and matricies. I thought I had scaled down enough other things for prototyping but perhaps there was more room than what I thought.
Well, this can actually have a pretty significant effect on the feel of the game so depending on what kind of game you were prototyping, it might be worth it (though, your better off hardcoding a few cases of SAT than trying to get it working completely generally in a prototype).
