@gazumped, if you could point me towards the Linux desktop client, I would be most obliged.
Regarding web client session management: this is not exactly rocket science. (Trust me on this. I've done rocket science.) Even the Quora.com platform - which suffers often from 504 Gateway Timeout problem due to slightly ropey servers - stores each change in real time, and can return to a previous session, character-perfect. The fact that Evernote sometimes stores a succession of ten or more duplicate notes within seconds is a bug, pure and simple.
And as for editing in a word processor, and then copying into Evernote: for me, the whole point of Evernote is that it reliably stores my notes in real time, and if something like a sudden power failure or crash happens, I've lost nothing. That's not a work-around. If I wanted to do that, I might as well just be creating Word documents and saving them to a Dropbox folder.
Sorry if this reads as aggressive. I'm not annoyed at you, I'm annoyed at Evernote for putting me in the situation where I have to consider these kinds of workarounds to avoid the dumb bug that's filling notebooks with duplicate notes I have to sort through to find the most current version.