I agree, most of the better known editors are bloated. I try to keep away if I can, especially from tiny and ckeditor. I haven't used elrte before, it seems a bit better. I have used jHtmlArea on a couple of projects with success, but lately I prefer WYMeditor. The .js is about 120kb minified, though, so still way bigger that jHtmlArea.
It's a strict XHTML WYSIWYM editor (not WYSIWYG, looks even better as far as I'm concerned). It needs a bit of UI polishing, but it produces great code. If anyone tries it out, I strongly suggest using the latest beta releases or the code from the repo. Old stable releases are pretty stale. https://github.com/wymeditor/wymeditor
