Has anyone had any luck installing the Visual Editor plugin in RTC?

The basic instructions that I'm using are:
http://www.eclipse.org/vep/WebContent/faq.html#install_howto

When using the standard Visual Editor update site (http://update.eclipse.org/tools/ve/updates/1.0), I get the following error:
Java EMF Model (1.2.3.v20070130_R----6zXJK-L2U8VZ) requires feature "org.eclipse.emf (2.2.0)", or compatible.

It looks like RTC comes with EMF 2.3.x, and so when I ignore the above warning, Visual Editor appears to install properly. However, when editing a visual class later on, the preview window simply stays blank after a long "Loading..." pause. The behaviour remains the same even if I ignore all of RTC's warnings and install EMF 2.2.0 anyway.

Does anyone know of a solution, or a replacement for Visual Editor? We are interested in doing RAD with Java AWT frames. We are not joined at the hip with Visual Editor, it just seems like the most popular choice.

Thank you for any advice and information that you have.