I would like to setup TinyMCE to allow literally any HTML without any cleaning whatsoever. I have tried mirriads of different settings, yet none of them eventually satisfied my needs.
I also need to have an option to make TinyMCE strip any styling from pasted text, and just leave the Ps and the ULs et cetera.
Question 1: This is a big expectation. Remember that the editor has to edit the content. It's a lot to expect it to handle anything a user might paste in and then edit it (bold, underline, indent) correctly. The editor is doing its own cleanup to make the content slightly sane.
Question 2: use the 'valid elements' option. http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE%3AConfiguration/valid%5Felements
probably something like valid_elements: 'p,ul,li'