I also started my own blog with the blog module and ended up starting over.
Things I can share:

• FCKEditor worked much better with my theme (GlossyBlue) than TinyMCE
• FCKEditor has a nicely integrated file and picture upload
• There is a "Read More Tweak" module that allows you to place the "Read More" text at the end of the teaser text and also to adjust the text itself.
• You have to hack the theme to get rid of the "(not verified)" message in comments
• The Fuzzy Search module allows for substrings to be found
• The Views module allows nice archive and tags grouping (including count)
• It wasn't a good idea to deploy Drupal in the root HTML directory - it makes upgrades much harder.