I have very similar experiences to what you sound like. I will also repeat about the tail boom being "drooped down". I had a devil of a time and finally went back to my LHS and he held it up and showed me that the boom had popped out of a C-clip inside the fuselage simply "popped" it back in. Now I have to do that about every time I land hard but it solved that one problem.

Now the launching. I have EXACTLY the problem you do, and most of the time I'm flying with a 7-cell I upgraded to. Have you tried putting on the landing gear and taking off? I'm able to take off fairly well from a little basketball court at the little middle school near my house that I fly at then I fly over the little soccer field next to it.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one with issues, I feel like this plane is actually pretty decent and certainly I've proven it's ruggedness but I'm far from being good at flying it.