Villagers / Horses / Mine-carts De-Spawning

I run a realm with 4 other people. Three of us use PC, 2 use console. All family members, all trusted (no griefing). It's survival MC.

Several bugs to report:

1) Dark room spawners do not work, plus zombies and skeletons seem to be randomly spawning during daylight, noticeable especially when you travel into unloaded chunks.

2) Items and mobs are despawning constantly.
Whenever we leave horses tethered to a post in a chunk that is not currently loaded (like if I leave my horse in one chunk, and my wife logs in and works 8 chunks away) when I log back in the horse will be gone. The post that it was tethered to will still show the animation of the attached lead, but if you click it, it (the lead animation) will vanish. I've tried using name tags, it does not work, still losing horses.

Villagers that I've isolated in a very secure (very well lit 8x8 glass box) will frequently despawn as well.
The villagers are farmers, I have them set up in several automatic farms, and the minecart/hopper will frequently despawn from the same location. (The location of our farms is several chunks away from the rest of our buildings and spawn location FYI, this is why I think that the chunks loading/unloading is the cause of this)

Cows will despawn, I have a small 8x8 area that I pack full of cattle for farming, eventually they will despawn as well.

3) I was mining underwater using aqua affinity/respiration 3 helm with a efficiency 5 shovel. During the mining, several water blocks (the actual square water source block) dropped. I picked one up and took it to the Neather and placed it on the ground and now have flowing water in the neather.

4) If you mine a ender chest with a silk touch pickaxe, the chest plus 8 obsidian will drop. Not really complaining about this one, it's an easy source for obsidian.

kinda sad about the horse. He could jump 5 blocks straight up and was crazy fast. I named him Phill-Leap Rivers because I could jump over rivers. Diamond armor too.