God knows why I'm fixated on getting Ted to work...but somewhere in the world is an antiX user who needs to run Ted. So here's the answer to getting the latest version in the repos (2.17-1) to run:

I traced down the maintainer (I think) of the Debian Ted package, who claims that the brokenness of the package is a result of Ted being unable to find the right Helvetica font on the user's system. This can be remedied by installing two files from the Lysistrata repos:

xfonts 75 dpi -transcoded
xfonts 100 dpi -transcoded

I did this in Lysistrata, restarted the machine, and *boom* there is Ted (note: restart, not just re-login).

Now just to make this interesting, I checked the default x-font installs in Spartacus, which runs Ted 2.17 easily (probably not relevant, but who knows?). Well, Spartacus knows nothing of the two files listed above, but it does run by default an xfonts 75 dpi and an xfonts 100 dpi package. In Lysistrata, only the xfonts 100 dpi package is installed by default. So I'm wondering what would happen if I removed the two"-transcoded" packages and left the original default font packages as they are, only adding the xfonts 75 dpi package that Spartacus runs but Lysistrata doesn't. I don't know if I'll try this or just leave a working install of Ted alone.

Okay, I know I'm talking to myself on this. But to the one other person in the world who might want to run the latest Ted in Lysistrata: You're welcome.