RizzoTheRat

You should get a navigation marker in your navball, try doing a 360 turn and see it shows up. 

I use SSTO boosters and fly them back from orbit so a little different than Falcon but the principal is the same. 
I find with little fuel and the engines at the bottom I've never had an issue with them flipping.  The biggest problem I have is on a standard ballistic trajectory you need to rotate pretty quick as you kill the horizontal velocity. 
To solve this I've based mine on New Glenn rather than Falcon.  I have small wings near the bottom, and fins further up, that are mounted backwards and disabled for launch.  On re-entry I use the now active fins for steering and combined with the wing and body lift I fly a vertical S shape, pitching the engine end up to bleed off horizontal speed while limiting vertical speed, and then pitching down hard so that I get a much more vertical trajectory than I would otherwise.  Airbrakes, mounted at the top, come on when I pitch down and slow it to something like 200m/s, so I need very little dV for the landing.
However not doing a high altitude braking burn like Falcon means most of the deceleration is aerodynamic, so I get a lot of re-entry heat.  After playing around with different engine configurations an engine plate with multiple Vectors is the only one that I've found that reliably copes with the heat.  I'd agree with the earlier comment about limiting the gimbal too.
I use kOS and coupled with Trajectories to calculate atmospheric drag my current script can put it down on the runway every time, but I'm still having issues getting the pitch down right to land accurately in range, ie I target the start of the runway and always overshoot by a bit.  As I have access all the data through kOS I calculate the required thrust to stop in the current distance to the ground, and then put the engines on full when that reaches 95% of the maximum thrust, this means I get down to a couple of m/s several meters off the ground and do a nice slow final descent.
 
Don't have a decent picture of it landed but here it is delivering components of my Mun base to orbit

If you're planning to land boosters, it's well worth looking at Kerbal Reusability Expansion, it has a lot of useful parts like New Shephard and Falcon Landing gear, and the Falcon grid fins.  the bulbus bit at the far end is the New Glenn landing gear.

Jets will take fuel from all tanks regardless of connections, so don't need to be directly connected to the tank.  similarly with air intakes, they don't have to be on the same part as the engine.
Not got a screenshot but a basic design I used recently had a Mk1 cockpit, Science Junior, and the conical fuselage/tail piece on the centreline, the one moveable tailplane part I had used as vertical and horizontal tails (ie 3 of them on the back of the conical thing), and for power I mounted a small jet fuel tank on each wingtip with a juno and air intake on each.  Single steerable wheel on the tail and the longer fixed gear under the body for a taildragger design.
If you have a bigger engine like the wheesley available you need one on the centreline, but then only have the small intakes so still need the small tanks to fit them on.  This was built for a contract to test the wheesley and some parachutes before I'd unlocked the wheesley, showing that you can get some pretty unconventional designs to fly.  the side pods are empty fuel tanks, with all the fuel being in the wing tip tanks, which have intakes front and back (the rear facing intakes don't produce any air but should reduce drag.