I am having a lot of trouble with the docks. Most other apps like this have a minimize or collapse function. Since you do not have this they are hard to control. It also seems that as soon as I get them into a state I can tolerate they auto-resize, and/or auto-snap to the top, or the bottom, or the side creating a visual mess with various docks on top of each other. My workaround is to close all docks and just constantly open and close them. Is there a way to turn off all this behavior?

You can lock the docks using a non-documented config entry, but apart from that, it's what it is. We did not implement the dock widget behaviour, it's what's our development platform gives us. It might not be perfect, but it beats coding that stuff on our own!

You can 'get rid of' all dockers by pressing the Tab key to go into 'Canvas only' mode, which some people like to do when they're painting. Then another press of the Tab key will bring you back to a display with the canvas/workspace surrounded by the active dockers.
The only way you can have a 'floating' docker is to drag it outside of the main window onto a second monitor, if you have one.

The behaviour of the dockers, that you've noted, allows you to set up personalised arrangements that can be saved and recalled, in conjuntion with the Workspace saver/selector tool which you'll find at the far right of the Toolbar. This is very flexible, powerful and useful.

You're familiar with other apps and I'm sure that you spent time learning how to use them. As well as this forum, there's a very good manual that's useful for learning about krita: https://docs.krita.org/en/