Whitespace reformatting issues (nbsp's are everywhere)

Some people on our team use wysywig, some people use plaintext. The plaintext people are getting annoyed by the wysiwyg people because every time they touch a page, a ton of reformatting occurs that drives the rest of us nuts:

• Blank lines in the markup often get removed. Those lines are important to keep it all readable.
• Weird things get escaped, and I can't figure out what the rules are for this. For example, I often see - in the markup. Why does - need to be escaped?
• The wysiwyg editor is very nbsp happy. I see it inserting nbsp's lots of times when only one space is involved. For example:

  #* _Beach, Black Sand_ \- still water, black sand, sea grass, bright and sunny.
  

nbsp's really clutter up the code and make it hard to read.

• I've also seen a bunch of cases where nbsp's are sitting at the end of a line. There's really no reason to keep whitespace (at least when generated by the wysiwyg editor) at the ends of lines.
• Check out this funky thing that someone made with wysiwyg:

   _Note:__ _ _we need a way to define custom/core reports and "mount" them into the system._
  

Neato.