I, too, found the Inspector very annoying when I first started working with Pages. It seems to counter-intuitive. But now that I'm used to it, I like it far, far better than Word. It keeps the work-space much cleaner.

I wonder if your problem with the double space removal has to do with the length of your project. I wrote my first novel on pages. Once I crossed the 200-page mark or so (as an American, I think in terms of pages, not words, but I'm trying to change that!) I found that Pages would crash, on occasion, when doing a spell check. The first crash was when I learned that Pages didn't have autosave, so I learned quickly to save before spell checking.

At any rate, I've never had a problem with the double space removal, but, then, I haven't tried it on an overly long document.

I'll need to look into Foreversave. I use the free WorkSaver. It's very good, but it creates a backup version of the file within the Finder, making for a very messy and disorganized Finder. A bit annoying.