Hi,
reinstalling Unity is unlikely to improve the situation. Even with years of experience, you still have a love/hate relationship with such complex software like Unity, keep asking, reading doc, searching the web for answers/tricks/solutions, that's the only way...
Mecanim is a tricky beast when you want to squeeze the last 10% percent of your gameplay that is not traditional. If you find something that works like you want, but in pure c# code, let me know, and I'll see if I can port it to PlayMaker.
also, thanks for your comments on PlayMaker, don't forget to leave a review if you haven't already, it goes a long way when people give feedback, it helps a lot.
Bye,
Jean