>I know this may sound sadistic, but how could I go about 
>programming in Smalltalk bytecode, directly?  

At least you can read the bytecodes created by squeak in the
current image:

  Open a browser in Squeak and select a method in a class.
  Right click on the methods name in the method pane and
  select "What to show..." and "byteCodes".

Have fun,
Torsten