After perusing a bunch of gallery-ish modules, I came across a great tutorial of how to build a gallery with just CCK and Views. The accompanying video made it a snap, and sure enough, in about an hour, I had to rocking.
There are a couple of things that aren't quite right. I'd lie to be able to let admin re-order the pictures, and also indicate the number of images per row. So I'm hoping there's a hook or theming function that I can override... Other than that, the gallery works like a charm. The thickbox dealio is pretty cool, but I think i need to make the next/prev links a little bigger for those of us who don't like to have to position the mouse so carefully. Also, I don't like how the position of the links varies according to the width of the picture.
hmm hmm hmm