These are all excellent ideas, and yours isn't the only voice I've heard calling for them. I keep reminding myself it's a beta site, but the built-in editor is a joke, both in terms of the problem you mentioned--the non-floating tool bar--and in terms of missing basic formatting tools. I've wasted hours following different advice and trying different ways of formatting, and I still find it all incredibly clunky. But then, I'm not a programmer and don't have much experience even with HTML.