Yes, I have been using the cut, copy and paste buttons on the keyboard. I prefer them to the dark popup bubble buttons which don't always appear or have the option I need. 

I agree, having them enabled makes the keyboard so large there is little room left to edit. But I love the swipeable keys.

Here is a screenshot of a case where I have placed the cursor and the keyboard has come up, but it covers the insertion point and the editing bubble:

Here is a case where the dark popup bubble doesn't that the editing option I want, "Copy" is missing:

I hope this shows the trouble!

Thank you for your reply. 

Thank you Alexander! I will try to remember to do that. My habit has been to select the 2nd way, probably tapping twice because the first tap didn't seem to work. Then having to lose my selection to bring up the keyboard.

I wonder if it would be possible to add a show-hide keyboard button on one of the tool bars? I actually find using the keyboard's copy and paste buttons are more reliable than the dark-bubble-above-the-selection options, some times they don't appear, or they appear when I don't want them to making moving the text-selection-start blue dot difficult, or they appear but don't have the desired copy or paste option available! (On that latter, it has happened a lot, but I don't recall which it is that is missing. But the keyboard one works.) I end up using the cursor navigation wheel a lot. Thanks for that tool!

If it would help I believe I could video these things.

Thank you!

Alexander, thank you for the reply. I wonder if you could take a look at my other post too, no one has offered suggestions yet...

http://feedback.textasticapp.com/topics/2197-new-user-selection-and-keyboard-access-difficulty-on-ipad/