no profile without at least one access permission

I agree. I'd like to have a tinymce profile called "Full Editor" which has all the buttons enabled instead of just the core buttons. This profile would only be available to Drupal's admin user (i.e. me). However without creating a separate role just for 'admin', I can't figure out how to do this.

This is all a very bad idea; if the module gave a default profile to the admin users as soon as you turned it on, the admin user would have his text areas replaced by tinymce without having any say in the matter. It's better to let people configure things first and not spring any surprises their way; plus there will be admins (like me) that prefer to use plain-old HTML/PHP code instead of letting a text editor mangle things up just by turning itself on. It only takes you a couple of minutes to set a profile that uses all the buttons, anyway, so I see no reason for having it turned into a default setting.

And having said all this, there's a point to the original post... it's a bit confusing, I think, that you have to set the same permissions on two different places for the module to work. It would be much simpler to just get rid of the "access tinymce" permission on the access control page, and just set the permissions inside each tinymce profile you create. Right?

Or is there some reason for the current state of affairs that I'm not seeing?

I agree. The other bug/feature I see is "Roles allowed to use this profile" are removed from future profiles you create. This means you can't have two profiles for one role, the reason you would want this is to assign different profiles to different pages of a drupal site by using the Visibility section. For example I would like a different profile displayed on my Wiki page so that users can only use limited formatting.

This has come up before. I thought about including the most common configuration as a default profile, but that idea was shot down for a number of reasons. Expanding on what ricmadeira mentioned, in addition to using a different theme for the admin users, many admins actually leave TinyMCE off for that user. They see TinyMCE as a necessarily crutch for users who don't know HTML. I'm more of a eat your own dog food admin myself, but I understand why someone might not want TinyMCE on for the admin user.

You could argue that including a default profile for the admin user would be helpful for new users, but someone else would argue that not knowing how to set up TinyMCE for a new role would just confuse new users who aren't used to managing users and roles. Making them go through the setup process for Authenticated users or a newly created Admin group forces them into at least a basic understanding of the relationship between roles and profiles.

As far as "full editor" being on by default for the admin? I think I'd have people putting a bounty on my head if I forced a couple hundred k of javascript and took away several lines of their textboxes in their UI by deafult... even if they had the option of turning that off.

I definitely think sites should have basic and advanced TinyMCE profiles, but I'm going to leave how they configure that up to them... as well as leaving the way that is configured consistent for each profile.

Modifying the TinyMCE module to use different profiles for each content type for each role is valid feature request... and one that has been made before. Unfortunately, no one has made it a priority to write code and design a UI that does that. I like the way Content Template allows an override for each content type. This gets a little more complicated because your override would have to select a profile per role (hopefully with a default for new roles). It's definitely possible to add something like this to TinyMCE, but if you have the time and coding skills to develop this I think your effort would be better spent contributing to the "universal WYSIWYG" module Sun started...

http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg
http://groups.drupal.org/wysiwyg

TinyMCE is a popular module, but Moxiecode has left a lot of legacy code in TinyMCE over the years. In addition to all the other WYSIWYG editors (FCKeditor, Htmlarea, BUEditor, widgEditor, Whizzywig, YUI Rich Text Editor, etc), you'd be foolish to believe that Moxiecode isn't working on something much cleaner, smaller, and more configurable. Looking ahead, a module that allows you to easily change editors as these new editors are released makes more sense.