1 I liked YuYu Hakusho.  Two caveats however.  One, a lot of what I experienced comes from the manga, which apparently has a different ending.  I did end up renting the final DVD and watching it, and it seemed well enough.  Two, I liked Yu-Gi-Oh.  I watched Yu-Gi-Oh dubbed, with the rest of the saturday morning cartoons.  In my defense, the later episodes are not near as hard to swallow when you've been watching from the start (More or less, they cut off the first season for the dub, and I checked out early portions of the manga to get an approximation of what happened there).
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Yu-Gi-Oh has also lasted quite some time, so that alone might not distingush YYH.  I do think YYH might be more your speed then Yu-Gi-Oh.  I am certain my tastes are different from yours, and possibly less discriminating.  I am not entirely certain what your tastes in a fighting series are.

2

My tastes?

DBZ was great. DBGT was disappointing. Tenjho Tenge sucked with a mighty wheezing sound.

Ikki Tousen is a mixed bag. I originally bought the first DVD, and watched part of it before giving up. But recently I've been curious, and thought that maybe I rejected it too soon. (And last summer I bought a boxed set.) Wonderduck says it's a bit like Divergence Eve, a show that's better than it seems to be for all the fan service (though he doesn't claim that it's anything like as good as Divergence Eve).

I plan to buy and (try to) watch Dragon Destiny when it finally comes out here.

There are other things I've seen that are more borderline that don't really count as "fighting shows", so I won't list them. I haven't really watched all that many true shounen shows, in fact.

3

Yu-Gi-Oh lasted quite some time, but it was an extended advertisement for the card game and with that kind of show they're willing to subsidize losses on the show out of profits made by the game, so its longevity doesn't prove much to me.

Pokemon was like that, too, though I think it was legitimately successful as an anime.

4 I think you may enjoy it. Yuusuke's a delinquent who has to come to grips with having responsibility thrust upon him, and he deals with it well. Definitely the kind of guy who's used to solving his problems by applying violence, but not a bad guy per se.

5

That was the impression I got from the reviews I read. And I gather he starts getting it together pretty early, too. Starting from about the time he observes his own funeral, and is shocked by what he sees.

Well, actually, probably starting from when he saved the kid, but...

6 From what I saw of it (on CN), it looked a little like DBZ, only slower moving, with maybe a tad more plot (that's not to say it's Shakespeare or CotS, though).

I kinda got bored with it and never remembered to watch regularly.  It might be more entertaining subbed and shotgunned, though...

7 The thing about YYH is that what you get in the first six or eight episodes is not what you end up with.  It was intended to be a somewhat romantic horror/adventure show involving Yuusuke, his girlfriend, and Botan (called Photon in the dub, ew), along with Kuabarra and the other two guys. 

The early shows have some moderately complex plots and character development.  Then the DBZ factor sets in.  You can see when it happens too; about the time Yuusuke goes for training with the old lady.  At that point, the studio decided "we need a fighting show to compete" so YYH goes off the rails, and the girls become strictly minor characters, useful for putting in danger, but not much else.  Named attacks (with their own titleboard), and constantly increasing power levels become a feature.  Single battles may last an entire episode or even two.  Somewhere on the web, I found a complete plot summary for every episode; what I saw made me happy CN quit carrying it.   Liked the first part, /enh to the rest, though momentum carried me for a while.
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8 Regarding the Ikkitousen series: come for the fanservice, stay for the story, particularly in series 2, "Dragon Destiny," which is the best of the three.  I wouldn't show them to anybody who hasn't expressed an interest in fighting anime, though.  As seems to be the usual luck for multi-season shows, the first series is the worst of the bunch, and the second the best.  ARIA and Nanoha trend that way as well (though if you prefer season 3 of ARIA, I won't disagree with you... I really like it, too).

9 I haven't seen Yu Yu Hakusho  in years and I only really watched it when it was running on Adult Swim but what I remember is fairly strong.  It does drag stories on as long as possible and winds up eventually being what I thought was a run of the mill tournament style series (I think by then it was on Toonami) and I never kept up with it, but the characters were pretty interesting, the dubbing wasn't awful and it at least was worth the half hour late at night.

There were also a couple of movies that stand alone pretty well.  The first one is only...what, half an hour?  The second one is 90 minutes and does a decent job of capturing the general feel of the series.

I'd say Yu Yu Hakusho is...at least worth a watch if you can find it for rent.

10 The anime version of Yu Yu Hakusho has a better ending since the manga series got a rushed ending due to differences between the author and publisher.  I'm not sure what the exact differences were but the result was that the author had to finish it in a hurry.  As the anime series was made during the manga run and continued after the manga series ended, there was time to make a proper ending for that.

The first few episodes as commented earlier is very different from the rest of the series before it goes into a fighting series mode.  I do disagree with the notion that it has filler episodes.  For a series of its length it has virtually no filler episodes.  Battles never take longer than two episodes which is actually rare.  What is more common is that one of the fighters has an episode for his battle.

The movies are pretty forgettable, and you won't really lose much if you never saw them.

As to whether you will like the series based on your taste?   The early YYH episodes have a bit of a lighter feel, somewhat like original Dragonball,with a not so serious feel.  The rest of the series never really goes overboard with the powers like DBZ with vast destruction as powers are generally localized to fighting someone or the space around an arena.  Battles never overstay their welcome lasting two episodes at most, so that may be a plus for you.  The characters are pretty likable and the women can be tough even if they may not have superpowers with the exception of Botan who has powers of her own.  You generally won't be let down by the bad guys, especially the main two in the series. 

It is closer to DBZ in feel compared to the other series you mentioned.  About the only other fighting series that I have seen that compares to YYH would be Flame of Recca with a similar team type fighting approach albeit with an open ending that depends on the manga.

I'd say give it a try, you may like it.  The price is cheap for the first brickpak.  I actually bought the entire series in singles as it came out and I have 3 complete rewatches so far, so it is a winner for me.  Because I like to watch entire series in one go, it's hard to get the time for rewatches at that number of episodes, so that actually shows how much I like it.

An interesting side note is that some of the earlier  single YYH DVDs were released in two versions, one dubbed only based on the US TV airing and the other uncut with dual language tracks, the dubbed DVDs were canceled later on in the series.  The DVDs also includes two different subtitle tracks one which is based on the dub for hearing impaired  people and the other on the Japanese track.  The DVDs also uses alternate angles to handle the credits sections of the episodes so you can choose between actual Japanese text or translated English text for those.  The DVDs also actually has subtitled songs for both the dub track and the Japanese track, it is interesting to see the differences between the two but I think that whoever recorded the dub song did an amazing job to capture the feel and tone of the Japanese song.   In any case, I'd be surprised if Funimation removed those features in the brickpak even as they pack more episodes into fewer DVDs.

11 It's been a while since I've seen it, but Yu Yu Haksuho is similar to Bleach except faster paced...
and it has better characters...
and a better story...
and better fight scenes...
and a lot less crap...

The story slows down when transition between arcs.  I guess that's to be expected, but some of those early Chapter Black episodes were nightmarish to get through.

Oh, and the best thing about Yu-Gi-Oh is Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series.