My most recent experience has mostly been the same, except it ends a little better than usual:

1. Start with TinyMCE, which has more-or-less worked in the past. This time around with Drupal 6, unfortunately, my experience was mostly less: it just wouldn’t respond to the customization settings I was setting in the Drupal backend.
2. Do some more research, find excitement about the YUI editor. It seemed promising, but ultimately failed to allow image uploads despite hours of fiddling.
3. Turn to the other oft-mentioned option, FCKeditor. After a few minutes of fiddling supported by the included readme.txt, it’s actually working and uploading images easily. Amazing!

Not everything in FCK is customizable through the web, but that’s fine. It’s probably easier to comment out a line in fckeditor.config.js, anyhow. I started with the DrupalFull toolbar & took off a few things we don’t want.

Since versions are so often key with these things, I’m using Drupal 6.6, fckeditor-6.x-1.3-rc3 (the drupal module), FCKeditor_2.6.3 (the javascript bit).

Including a reasonably debugged WYSIWYG in the Acquia distribution would get me to take it for a test drive next time around, because this cycle is such an amazing waste of time whenever I go through it.