I went through the source of Dot.Text and found the file EntryEditor that seems to handle all rich text (WYSIWYG) boxes throughout the admin app.  After a bit of tweaking and a recompile.  I uploaded the new freetextbox.dll, noticed some outdated properties, which I just totally removed.  Had to modify the web.config (not the admin one, just the root web.config) to put in a new verb in the httpHandlers (what is this btw?  must investigate).  Now it's working.

Here's to my first post through the updated FTB 3.0.   All in all it was pretty painless, but...FCKEditor is still way better than this sucker, and it's just get better.  It's also totally free, if you want the "Pro" version of FTB it's going to cost your ass 50 bucks.  I'd switch this to FCK, but I wanted a fix in less than 10 minutes :)