Don't be ashamed of your WOT... There are still people on the forums that have a long enough attention span to get beyond the second sentence and enough time and patience to use punctuation and grammar while writing.
About your issue about the Google contacts that keep showing up. It sounds like you moved from a 'feature' phone (e.g. not a smartphone) and are now in the realm of the smartphone experience. Much of the experience on the phone (and with other applications and websites) is about consolidating, organizing and merging together everything. Coming from the "I'll configure it all myself, thank you very much" perspective, it can be frustrating to have the phone think it knows best. You'll probably find that other applications you use will do the same thing - assume they know better than you what you want, and they'll either configure and enable it by default, or they may ask you with a "hey, do you want me to just set it up for you?" type question - to which you'll probably say yes, and then find it's not to your liking. I certainly had the same experience as you when I first got my phone. I had them migrate my contacts from my old phone, and then after adding the google account, I went home only to find I had hundreds of contacts that I frankly don't care about from ancient e-mails.
At any rate, the fact that the Bionic syncs all your gmail contacts into its contact list is just a setting. Rather than deleting the contacts one by one, you can just tell the phone to ignore all the gmail contacts and use only the ones in the phone itself. The "phone only" contacts list is the same type of list you probably managed on your previous phone.
I have upgraded my Bionic to a later version of Android (ICS or "Ice Cream Sandwich") so my default contacts application is likely to be different than yours. But, here's what I do to limit the contacts that are shown.
1. Press the "Contacts" app (or choose it from your list of apps).
2. Press the "Settings" button and choose "Contacts to Display"
3. Select "Customize" at the bottom of the list
4. Ensure that the group "Phone" is enabled.
5. Uncheck the one listed as your gmail account for Google contacts.
6. Go through any others that are listed and turn them off (assuming you don't actually want to show those contacts).
7. Choose OK to save your settings.
Regarding your texting question, I've been using a program "Go SMS" as my texting application. It allows me to set per-contact notification settings (e.g. different "ding" when a message comes from each contact) includig whether to vibrate the phone, etc.
I also use Go Contacts, and Go Launcher Pro. Working together, they're great and they offer a nice range of customizations. You can always turn them off and return to the "stock" behavior very easily.
I don't know about the bluetooth behavior - I don't use a BT headset. But, you might find that there is an application you can load which will set up the behavior your looking for. That's one thing about the Android phones - there are a lot of little "customize/tweak" apps in the Play Store.
HTH...
