[IKE]

To the OP,

Chain's do not "handle torque", they handle tension as your rating called out. Chains are excellent for doing what you are looking to do.

With a big enough sprocket, you could make thousands of foot pounds of torque with 25 pitch chain. It just might be a a very big sprocket. As Archimedes said, with a large enough lever, I could move the world.

As far as pivots go, FRC 33 used large bushing for the 2005 and 2007 robot. The joints were really nice to work with and gave smooth operation, though the arm construction could be difficult.

With high torque though can come high forces, and you do need to be mindful of the loads. If you would like help doing calculations and layouts, let me know and we can figure these out as a an open case study.

We would start with calculating the amount of load and how far/fast we wanted to move it, and thus would dictate a minimum motor power. Based off of that, we can pick a motor, and then figure what sort of methods we could use to get the right torque.