Hi James, I’m a cofounder/codeveloper of Sparkle. Thanks for looking at Sparkle and for the honest review.
I empathize with you in the frustration you’re finding in using Sparkle. Sorry about that, we do regard these issues as UI bugs and definitely want to improve and polish Sparkle more.
That said, the web has changed a lot in the last 10-15 years, techniques change, skills become obsolete. Best practices for creating a high performance and backwards compatible site make the “fast path” very narrow, and having a visual editor for site and element properties makes it much easier to express intent, helping Sparkle produce the most efficient code.
Also we have the goal to deliver a truly visual website builder, which explains HTML embedding being relatively underdeveloped. That also means that what Sparkle doesn’t currently support has to wait for a later version.
The preview is live in Sparkle, so you don’t actually need to open/close it all the time, it updates in real time as you edit the Sparkle document. We definitely should support the workflow you are used to, and add a shortcut.
Sparkle’s favicon editor actually creates 15 different images for different platforms and devices, I guess putting it in an HTML block is something you need to unlearn?
I’m surprised the “Add” button in the image inspector wasn’t easy to find, perhaps we need to rethink the UI in that area. Speaking of images, Sparkle by default generates 1x/2x for each device, and in 2.1 most likely will also generate webp’s in addition to jpegs, so a typical multi layout document would produce 20 images, wrapped in a
Text as squiggles are a sort of default wireframe/draft look, though the lorem ipsum is a single button click in the text inspector.
A full review takes time, so perhaps looking at what can be done with Sparkle can help, for example on http://sparklecafe.com or the responsive sites featured on our home page, http://lioneldarian.com and http://davidpuckett.com — build entirely visually.
While Sparkle isn’t for everybody, it is great for visual thinkers and people who don’t want to tinker with code. We’re a tiny company and harsh reviews definitely harm us, and frankly there are so many alternatives that it boggles my mind that anyone would take a firm “no” stance, more like “not for me”?
Anyway, we’re super passionate about our product and very responsive, test me 
Duncan
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