Making mead/honeywine doesn't seem like a difficult process with the right tools, being not even "deceptively" simple, but just appearing dead-simple. 
 
I am however curious, for you fellas who have given it a shot....
- Is it okay to use standard, off-the-shelf "fake" honey?
- Is it possible to sub out a portion of honey for something like fruit, fruit juice or brown sugar?
- Any thoughts on using non-official equipment - like switching out a glass gallon jug for a gallon plastic milk or juice jug, or maybe using a balloon instead of a bottle airlock?
- Any particularly hardships or VERY important things to make note of beyond the obvious things like sanitizing everything?
 
Seems like an interesting process and I'm sure it'd be a rather fun adventure 

Pretty much all of the things you suggested will "work" but yer gonna end up with more of "jailhouse" style alcoholic beverage.
 
Go to your local homebrew/winemakers shop(s) and pick their brains. You could probably order some "mead grade" honey for cheaper than the crud you buy in the grocery store (and if you're lucky maybe one of the staff can point you to local beekeepers to get pure unpasteurized/untainted honey straight from the source).
 
Also, if you can't afford the nice glass brewing jugs, instead of using those plastic gallon jugs out of your recycle bin get some sealable sterile buckets. You know those big white plastic ones that they use for everything from food to paint? If it has a screw top in the lid then you can simply buy the cork/water seal tubey thing from the home brew place and have at 'er.
 
Also YEAST QUALITY MATTERS! Get the appropriate brewer's yeast. You CAN use standard baker's yeast but it's gonna funkify your brew.
 
Trust me on this. I've made a couple attempts at make wine the way you are suggesting with the balloons and substitutions (except in used glass wine bottles instead of plastic jugs) and... well... it wasn't great. In fact it was quite gross.
 
This is biological chemistry. Very tempermental stuff. I gave up because it wasn't worth the PITA.

To be honest I've never tasted homemade wine that I liked. I've never tried home brewed mead though. 
 
Actually the one exception was some wine a friend made many years ago out of strong weed. Now that was a good drink. 

There is a reason they call it a "craft".
 
It's like baking bread. Sounds simple enough but once you start trying to do it from scratch... well you suddenly realize that $3-5 loaf of sourdough from the local bakery ain't such a bad deal after all.

Yeah I went through the bake my own bread/cakes thing some years ago before realizing that the effort/reward ratio just wasn't worth it. 

If you are doing bottle per bottle, the balloon thing will work quite nice. Poke several pin holes in it to let off the CO2 pressure.
You are probably way better off listening to Beep, who seems like he has some more classy experience.
We used to do rotgut wine with frozen grape juice, white sugar, bread yeast, balloon. Cheap vintage hi in 2 weeks after you siphon off the wine above the sludge.
 
Did a balloon bottle of Hawaiian Punch ethanol ready for a 2 week drunk using bread yeast. Forgot about it and it was in a dark closet for 6 months. When found, it had turned into an elegant rose' bubbling champagne. 5 star stuff.
 
John
 

Mead is pretty simple.  The biggest problem is aging.  Mead takes a long time to get good.
 
Start at http://gotmead.com/
 
Something I learned making wine.  A 6 gallon batch takes little more effort to make than a 1 gallon batch, but it takes nearly twice as long to drink

 
"Something I learned making wine.  A 6 gallon batch takes little more effort to make than a 1 gallon batch, but it takes nearly twice as long to drink "
 
This is true wisdom obviously earned and learned from life's hard core experience.
 
John