Charles, from RadGeek, wrote back and the fix was something simple. His plugin relies on the cURL PHP extension, currently. And, it was not enabled on my installation. So, it is enabled now and the “FeedWordPress” plugin works like a charm! Charles seems like a really nice guy. He writes that perhaps a new “release should be out soon” that makes the plugin more universally usable. Kudos to the RadGeek!
Todd, I guess that could be done, because the plugin would go into each new blog and each new blog can then be configured to aggregate any one feed or a multiple number of feeds.
My first observation is that it treats the dates correctly, unlike the wp-rss-aggregate.php one does. And “FeedWordPress” does pull in the posts as they exist (links functional and all) from the parent blog and also places them in (or creates them, if they don’t exist) the correct category folder that exists in the parent blog, too.
I think now I’m going to create a fresh WP 1.5 install and test it on that. “FeedWordPress” is much more powerful and it ‘is’ the WordPress ‘keeper’ app.

By the way, sorry for all those link blog trackbacks. I’m testing a new link blog in a subdomain blog – so, that’s the reason for all that above.