WordPress HTML eeditor

WordPress is driving me nuts – I seem to spend all my time fighting the system. I’m running version 4.0 with Windows 7 and Firefox latest. I have the Blankslate theme installed with plugins TinyMCE Advanced and HTML Editor Syntax Highlighter.

I want to write my posts and pages (I edit all code files with Sublime Text) as on other sites in an editor like Notepad++. I don’t like the visual editor. But every time I update I’m finding that WordPress has wiped some
tags, added extra ones, added <p> tags etc. Even if I write posts in another editor and paste them in, WordPress is still buggering about with my code when I update.

Is there some way to completely disabling all this crap and just allow normal editing?

I’ve tried <?php remove_filter ('the_content', 'wpautop'); ?> but that seems to conflict with TinyMCE Advanced