Is doing the fancy stuff where I have to put ground tea in a tea ball and washing the darn thing out every day really worth it?
No, don’t use ground tea. Grinding is for coffee. Use whole tea leaves.
The problem with tea bags is that (a) they use really ****ty quality tea, (b) they chop it into super tiny pieces. As a result, there’s much greater surface area, and the tea loses a lot of its flavor through oxidation. A good loose-leaf tea can be steeped 3–6 times depending on the type. A tea bag is pretty much used up after one steep.
I wouldn’t recommend using one of those little tea balls – they don’t really give the leaves room to expand. You could use a tea pot, or if it’s just one cup at a time I like the little mug-insert steeper thing I pasted a picture of up above. Or for green tea I often just put the leaves directly in a glass or mug.
Why not just boil water in a kettle?
Americans, by and large, don’t have kettles.