I can't remember what I took out. I'm not much of a coder, but rather systematically broke someone else's hard work until it did what I wanted. I zipped it up if you want to take a look at it.
Like I said, it works fine for me on 1.5, but looking at the author's website, it seems there are some changes I'll have to read about before putting it in a 2.0 blog. If there are any issues with it not working on your blog, I'd check the author's website.
The zip file is at
http://www.superpimpdesigns.com/misc/simpletags.zip
There also seems to be some debate as to if you'll be penalized by technorati for using no anchor text. I haven't seen any sign of that yet in my stats, but I think when I upgrade to 2.0, I may try hiding it with CSS, just to be on the safe side.