Tie placement of eighth notes is infelicitous particularly with eighth notes

I am working on a score where I prefer the eighth-note beams to be broken (click note, go to "Properties", "Beam" select "no beam" for both notes). Cool. These notes do need to be tied together, so I do that. However, the placement of the tie is inconsistent and is therefore less than felicitous.

The circle (well, square) at "a" in my screenshot is what it should be — I realized that somehow I hit "s" instead of "t", hence the initial discrepancy between the "ties" which led to this post. The same with a star is what happens as a default placement of an actual tie. I'm noticing that ties and slurs are better than in MS3, but they're constantly in the way of stems and dots in a way that looks, well, sloppy, but this is not the right score as I have no examples of where the dot of one note is covered up by a tie in the same or in another voice.

Anyway circled with two stars is what happens when I adjust the tie in Properties (an actual tie, not a slur): it doesn't look quite right, but it's correctly positioned on the y-axis.

Playback is affected, of course, which isn't a problem for me, because I know what's supposed to happen here (and on paper, of course it looks almost exactly like a tie; I'm not sure that a slightly thicker tie is all that noticeable).

Maybe I'm all alone in thinking that the default placement of a tie should be above the stems of eighth notes and not in the way of the flag! I could, of course, put the tie underneath, but having the option to cleanly put the tie above the notes is important to me as well… (I'm on 4.2.1 for Mac, although I suppose that this isn't really a new problem at this point.)