I asked about this about a year or two ago and received the same amount of feedback that you have (:
One way to make this a bit less painful is that there is a "Turn Editing ON" option in the course admin tab. This way you do not have to scroll up to get to it although once you do turn it on the page will default to the top and you will have to scroll back down.
One peeve is that infernal "Add a Block" block that is a real estate hog when editing is on.