Cross-staff collisions and stem direction

See attached. For some reason putting the middle voice tenor C in the bass clef causes the note spacing to squish. Also, shouldn’t the cross-staff force the stem on the bass voice low C to point down? Of course, I can modify all this manually, and the stem direction is particularly easy to fix. But it would seem that the note spacing shouldn’t be an issue here—and in either case flipping stems becomes tedious if this situation occurs many times.
Screen Shot 2018-04-26 at 11.00.59 AM.png

Coincidentally, I was about to report a very similar observation. See screenshot: it’s not the cross-staff that messes things up, it’s the cross-beaming (if it’s called like that). The upper voice would allow for tight spacing on its own, but in this context the lower voice should take precedence.
Schermafbeelding 2018-04-26 om 17.24.20.png

If you have the option to apply an optical adjustment to between-staves beams switched on, in the Note Spacing page of Layout Options, then you will get that kind of distortion in any coincident music that does not move between staves, because the spacing columns are being nudged left and right to produce the expected appearance for the places where the stems are opposing. When other music is going on, you may find it preferable to disable the optical adjustment in Layout Options and instead use the circular note spacing handles in Engrave mode to adjust only those notes.

Thanks, that seems to have taken care of this situation. What exactly does “optical spacing” mean, and when should I use it/not use it? I have a lot of situations like the one I posted in this project, so perhaps turning it off is the thing to do this time around. What about the (devil’s advocate) use case of 50/50 “I need optical spacing here”/“optical spacing ruins my life here”?