On that note, I'm much less interested in seeing what happens when you "tweak the HTML," than in getting a straight answer explaining exactly what you did to each file to get the output you are so proud of.
I take each html file, compile it to epub using epubmaker, and from there to mobi using Kindlegen v2, take a look at it on multiple Kindles, see where it is "breaking" -- displaying totally unreasonable things, things one does not see happening in the HTML version in HTML browsers and which therefore *do not* represent the HTML author's intent -- and then I "pop the top" on the epub and take a look in there and try to find what is going wrong, which after five years playing around with Kindles, EPUBs, PG, DP Files etc is by now usually pretty obvious for me, and I fix it. Sometimes the encoding on the images is wrong. Usually the problem is in the CSS, which has typically been designed by somebody who has a 20" wide monitor who is sure they "know" HTML and is trying to figure out how to fill up that huge space. Which will almost certainly "kill the book" when the display device is 3" not 20" wide. Sometimes the problem is what is NOT in the CSS -- the CSS just "happened" to work on the author's web browser, but there was not a reasonable expectation that it *should* have worked. And then I have to fill in what should have been in there, but is not. Sometimes the problem cannot be fixed in the CSS -- as presumably Marcello discovered when he decided he had to explicitly kill page numbers in epubmaker. And sometimes the HTML is so screwed up I cannot come up with any reasonable explanation of why I see what I see in there and then I just have to give up and declare defeat: "I'm sorry I just don't see any easy way to save this book -- maybe Marcello *should* rewrite this one." But most books can be easily "saved", hopefully without hurting the original HTML author's feelings too much. For that matter, *I* wouldn't know how to write to a 20" wide monitor -- if I was asked to "fill it up please." Note that if PG wants to keep both "big and small" versions of the HTML in the same file there are @media pragmas that can help one do this -- just not the @medias one normally hears about. And usually the amount of changes that need to be made are small enough to keep this from getting really clunky.