Question about Outlook Express

Hello all, I have some questions about the new Live@edu/Office365 migration that, as far as I can tell, has just recently been applied at my institution. Having read all the relevant wikis/blogs I could find I still feel unsure as to what the capabilities and limitations actually are.

The main thing I wanted, which may or may not have ever been the intention, was to have full access to all my addresses within one account. The attraction of using 365 for this is mostly down to the IMAP connections, so I can see everything that arrives on those other servers and not just whatever lands in its main folder, as would be the case in an Outlook.com POP3 scenario. At the moment I do have all my accounts linked (suppose I should thank Microsoft for allowing this at last via what must be a very recent inclusion of IMAP support in Hotmail/Outlook.com)... or at least one-way.

The idea of having to 'send on behalf' is really quite ludicrous when my Hotmail can easily handle all of my SMTP needs at once, including two instances of Exchange. The lack of administrator privileges means I can do absolutely nothing about that. When I discovered the new dimension to the @edu system, where I now had a duplicate ID for SkyDrive etc, and even its own alias function, I thought the answer had finally arrived. Why was this not the case? Probably because, apparently, this side of the portal is designed for a totally different kind of usage, which excludes email itself. Seriously? I can even see the 'Outlook' tab next to People, but when I click it I just get a reminder that an Office365 account needs OWA to see its messages.

I know that other flavours of the service have a different Web App that does sit in the same place as the other features, in an interface more akin to Outlook.com and the Microsoft Accounts. I presume they even get those nice extras we always had in our Hotmail inboxes that were omitted from Exchange (the spam/junk buttons are a huge part of my experience there and to not see any sort of substitute is a problem for me). It feels like a lose-lose. The choice I have to make for my go-to mail hub is basically between missing important features that the twin-pronged @edu makeover is almost promising without actually delivering, or not really having full control across my seven aliases (not all of which are Microsoft).

Apologies if this is slightly vague, but frustration is setting in on realising my revamped college email was in fact not much improved at all on what I had before and the restrictions that hamper it still remain - unless I missed something here? Is there some hidden way to bring both incarnations together somehow? Sadly I doubt it and suspect that if I want the 'best bits' of Hotmail and Exchange at once, the only way is to have two separate logins that can barely even cooperate with each other.

Thanks in advance.