christina
I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I have been dealing with the platform behavior and metroid/mario/megaman/cobra genre of games to teach some kids, also, I did my own project with all the learned knowledge.
The equilibrium have been developed to meet a gigantic portion of collision checks and all did with detectors.
On the first step, I give up of using the platform behavior, but since the behavior was updated even more, I changed the code to take advantage of it.
So, I can say with certain baggage, the platform behavior is very precisely now, but, you'll need to think on new ways of checking the environmental conditions.
The only thing I'm working around actually is the vertical speed, because I didn't figured out how to stop the player on a wall after a jump, all my tries finished with player slow sliding the wall. So, I decided to use an invisible sprite with no behavior and set it to meet the player X,Y, and when hit a wall, simple change who is meeting who, and the player stop on the wall =)
Take a look on the sample (I don't know why, but dropbox is doing some weird problems and you'll need to use another navigator to play the game...)
Press on my signature to see the system.
Use the arrow to move, or the mouse.
A is the jump, if I remember right.
Take the box with the mouse.
EDITED:
I forgot about another problem to deal, because the player is not on the ground, in other words, he is on the air or wall, the falling speed will keep updating, and was necessary to set the speed to 0 while on a wall, or climbing a ceil.
I don't know if it make sense, but you'll need to deal with the same thing on your study.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJFQftlOdH0[/tube]