Somewhere along the upgrade path, Unity has developed some strange logic behind window layering. First, before Oneiric, there was a way to see all the windows of an application - I think it was when you click on the icon in the launcher. Now, clicking on the icon often does nothing. Suppose I have two terminals open, one behind this Firefox window, and one in front of it. Clicking on the launcher does nothing - the only way to find the second terminal, afaics, is to move the Firefox window or use the task switcher.

Secondly, once I have both terminals on top, then I decide to close one of them, suddenly they both disappear (the second one, for some reason, has gone into hiding behind the Firefox window).

Third (though I can't pin it down now), sometimes when a window is on top, focus is still on a window in back; I click on the top x to close the window in front, only to find I've closed an important window in the back. (Update: this question details the problem)

I can't really believe these are bugs, since they seem too obvious to not have been fixed by now. My question is, am I missing something? Some compiz option I can set to make it act like it used to? Or is this really how Unity is supposed to act?