Ilike both episodes too and I'm not saying the issues they deal with aren't important to the characters. It's that the way they're introduced is so unsubtle and ever so slightly off kilter. Xander may have felt zeppoish before but he's never acted as zeppoish on a patrol before and have everybody else comment on it. On top of that the way the issue du jour gets tied up at the end is so tidy. Someone could watch those episodes without having seen anything of Xander or Willow beforehand and still understand exactly what was being said about them. In some ways this is a strength but I still maintain that S3 is different from the later seasons in being more obviously written from episode to episode at characterisation level as well as at plot level.

Buffy's clinginess towards Angel (which runs through Choices as well) follows nearly immediately her discovery that Angelus is much closer to the surface than Buffy had thought (in "Enemies")
This confuses me. You guys are all on team "there's only one Angel" (me too) but you still like to talk as if there were an Angel and an Angelus in the mix. In this particular case I think what Buffy experienced in the wake of Enemies was fairly straightforward sexual jealousy/insecurity, which she is very prone to but I'd blame her dad not Angel for that. In fact that may me my major difference with you and Maggie, I think Angel is symptomatic of issues Buffy has with men (so is Spike to an extent), he's not the cause of them and changing her attitude to him won't cure them.