Either I haven't figured out the right camera options, or else the camera is really buggy

Before picking up the game, I asked if it was polished or still a buggy mess.  People said that it was highly polished, and for the most part, that's true.  The camera views, on the other hand, sure look like a buggy mess to me. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I've merely botched the settings, though I have gone through camera settings very carefully and tweaked anything that seemed promising.  Perhaps someone here can explain if I'm doing something wrong.

Problem 1, and by far the biggest:  the camera has a rather nasty tendency to spin up into the air so that all that I can see is the sky or ceiling or whatever.  Such a camera view is obviously useless for most purposes, and I've never seen another game do this.

The times it does this are not at all random.  Rather, it reliably happens when I run into something much taller than me.  Thus, as a ranged class, it doesn't happen much.  As melee, it happens a lot.  It looks like the camera is trying to adjust upward to look at something above me.  That might be kind of understandable if it only spun up into the air briefly and then came back down once I got a little distance between me and the mob.  The problem is that the camera doesn't do that; it spins up into the air and stays there, even after I run away or the mob dies or whatever.  It never automatically spins back to show me the ground--and a good view of what is going on.

This is especially troublesome because I use a gamepad.  A gamepad has far fewer buttons than a keyboard has keys, of course, which means that I can't have dedicated buttons for everything.  All of the buttons and many combinations of buttons are already assigned to one thing or another, and I have to ration and prioritize what I need easy access to.  I haven't set any combination of buttons to fix the camera, and would hope that I wouldn't need to.  But that means that when the camera decides to go nuts, I have to let go of the gamepad, grab the mouse, and fix it that way.  That's a major nuisance.

Is there any way to tell the game, don't rotate the camera vertically unless I do so manually?  If so, that would fix the problem.

Problem 2:  scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom out sometimes zooms in dramatically.  It's entirely predictable when this will happen.  If a wall blocks the camera, it moves the camera in much closer, of course.  If you try to zoom out while the camera is forced closer to you, the game decides that you want the permanent distance of the camera to be whatever the wall distance is.  Move away from the wall and the camera stays close in.

I'm not sure why someone at Square-Enix decided to make the controls for zooming out lock the zoom distance much closer to you than it had previously been.  That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that someone would do intentionally, so it's probably a glitch.  But I haven't found a way around it.  Because logging out resets your zoom distance, I have to reset it every time I log in, and sometimes it's a bit of a pain to get away from walls before I can zoom back out and have it take.

Problem 3:  I was playing just now and the game decided to lock me into a first-person viewpoint.  As you probably know, a first-person viewpoint is a big disadvantage in most games where it is optional, and FFXIV is not an exception to that.  Fortunately, I was only mining, and was stealthed, so it didn't get me killed.  But moving the camera around didn't fix it, nor did trying to zoom out--or, for that matter, to zoom in.  Moving to a different zone didn't fix it, either.  Logging out and back in did fix it.

Admittedly, I haven't put that much work into addressing problem 3, as I've only seen it happen once, and decided to tack it on while I was creating a thread about the camera anyway.  But if it happened in a dungeon run, it could be big trouble:  imagine trying to tank without being able to see the mobs.  Does anyone know how to get out of first-person mode if the game locks you into it?  Or better yet, how to disable it so that the game doesn't lock you into it in the first place?