How to stop the wysiwyg editor from misbehaving?

I’m seeing quite a few misbehaviors in the wysiwyg editor. I tries (and fail) to be a smarty about especially <p>..</p> and <br/> tags but I’m the ones who decides what’s what, not some editor.

1. Two neighbouring <br/> tags get split into a paragraph separation. This is NOT the same thing, as paragraphs may have different styles than the default “1 line of top/bottom margin”. Plus if it’s in a <ul> it produces invalid XHTML, resulting in a YSOD.
2. The source editor omits all <p> tags and puts double newlines instead. Again, this is NOT the same, plus the source editor should be exactly that: a source editor that edits the exact source of the page, i.e. NO intelligence.
3. Using the backspace on paragraph separations make a previous turn into a paragraph separation, or somthing like that. It’ll go funky and it’s easy to get confused and distracted from the task of writing actual text.

Final wrap-up question: what do I do to make the editor behave the way I want it to? You know, like a real editor. No undue intelligence, no bugs that don’t exist in every single other editor.