Yes, this is more along the lines of what I would like from Pinegrow; Espresso with a visual edit mode or Dreamweaver without the overbearing corporate overlord. Or a more modern, up-to-date BlueGriffon without all the bugs. Any of those would do.
As is, I like Pinegrow in many respects — which is why I paid for it; to show my support — but I find myself having to switch over to other apps too often for really basic tasks — spell check, tables, look up the size of an image — and the visual editor mode losing links on copy-paste is a nightmare. It essentially makes editing impossible. I have never encountered an HTML editor that loses embedded links when you copy paste a block of text in a visual mode. 
I think highlighting the elements and requiring a double click makes it awkward and not fun for actual writing. Most HTML editors with a visual mode just create a new paragraph tag when you hit return when writing — BlueGriffon even has a preference where you can toggle this on or off — but Pinegrow doesn’t seem to do this consistently (in the middle of an existing block of text, for example). When it does create a new paragraph, it’s not on a new line in the code, either. 
This part, from Pinegrow’s promo, I find awkward at best:
Use Pinegrow as a CMS for your static Html pages. Move elements around and double click on any element to edit its text content.
Maybe I’m overlooking something. Espresso has a handy “X-ray” mode to turn element visibility/selection on or off in the real-time preview; which is perfect, except it can’t be edited visually at all. I’ll think about this a bit; maybe Pinegrow could do something similar in visual mode — structure visible and clickable or structure invisible and content clickable.
As is, Pinegrow is just too much of a pain to use for writing; I find myself using other apps, but I’m optimistic it will get better going forward.