Microsoft is aware that blog  and Wiki features are inadequate.

That said, have you tried using Word 2007 as your blog post  editor? Not
only is it a great blog post preview  tool, but it can publish a draft to
your SharePoint blog.

I take it from your first sentence that
there is no process in place for taking specific user suggestions about
those inadequacies. Perhaps your contacts at MS would be interested...

Word 2007 might be a good choice, except that I'm usually on a Macintosh
. Until Word 2008 comes out for the Mac, Word is not such a good
option. I tried using a MetaWeblog API client, but I had some problems with
authentication (probably caused by having SSL on our SP 2007 environment,
but I never got back to debugging it).

But your suggestion has me thinking again about non-browser clients for
blogging. I'll look into it.

I don't know what options that Mac users have for non-browser clients
for blogging. If you find a good one for use with SharePoint blogs,
please post  a follow-up here.