This is no longer an issue as Confluence 4.0 has a single editor and thus no toggling between wiki markup and rich text.

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+4.0+Editor+FAQ

I just tested Confluence as tool for our documentation and this issue is a really big problem. I want to write our manual with Confluence but this problem let´s me doubt if Confluence is the right tool therefore. I want to produce a document that should have an amount of 300 different pages (PDF has about 500) and nearly each page includes tables, lists and images, that cannot be edited with just one of the two editors - I must use the RTE for tables and the Wiki markup for lists and the preview to get a preview for the images (position, size, alignment,...). This issue should really be higher prioritized !
Sometimes it even happened, that the cursor disappeared in the RTE and was not displayed until typing any text. I don´t know if this is another issue or not. I´m using firefox 3.6. and Confluence 3.4.6.

I just got off a conference call where my supervisor was screaming and complaining about just this issue!

Just to add some weight, I personally find this one of the most annoying things about Confluence - something that should be really simple is made difficult. I'm also just starting to encourage people within our organisation to use Confluence and this item is one of the pieces of feedback I'm hearing repeatedly.

I concur with the above comments. Usability is the primary driver of widespread adoption. Wikis will remain niche products as long as their usabiltiy lags that of the tools used daily by knowledge workers.

We are currently trialling Confluence as our main repository for specs in conjunction with Jira. I've been impressed but this is a consistent annoyance - I find myself switching between editing modes (and preview) frequently as I review what I have written. This is the type of "small" usability issue which actually looms much larger than it seems.

I was just told by an architect at my company that the loss of context when switching from mark-up to RTE was the single most annoying thing about using Confluence for creating a 10 page document.

I've been creating far longer documents (up to 50 pp.) and have through trial-and-error evolved a system using Firefox search to get back to my editing point.

However in the spirit of wiki ('simplest thing that could possibly work') it would seem that it would be ideal if the three Confluence editing modes knew about each other at least to the degree of being able to come close to maintaining the cursor position when switching.

(Some advocate simply turning off the RTE. However I sold Confluence to the company on the basis of having an RTE – esp. for table creation – so that is not an ideal solution.)

I suggest raising priority on this issue: while the issue itself may seem trivial, it is part of a broader pool of usability problems affecting the RTE which makes our company users quit using Confluence for important documents. Such bad usability behaviours of the RTE is the most important source of complaints at our company, to the extent that it is now jeopardizing our company's adoption of Confluence. Anyone marketing-oriented listening?

Thanks for the suggestion Chris.