Blog posts element layout vs default blog page in enfold theme

Hi,

I am trying to achieve a relatively simple behavior:
– use a static home page and use a blog page that displays a set of post categories. Categories are key here, I have dedicated pages for some categories with a grid layout (these are typically alerts of commercial deals), and I don’t want these deal categories on my blog page that has a single author big preview layout btw.

I tried two options but neither is good enough:
1. created a blank blog page and set my enfold preferences to point my static main page and pointed the blog to the new blog page. This looks fine, however this way I am not able to configure to display only the categories I want. I tried adding a menu item, but that will only give me one category per menu item, which is not enough.
2. the other thing I tried is this: reset my enfold page settings to default. Created a blog page and added a blog posts element with a single author big preview layout and picket the categories I wanted. Configuration options are adequate, theoretically this should be perfect. However when I look at this blog page the posts are not displayed the same way they are displayed in the default Enfold blog page, because:
– video posts and gallery posts are displayed with their featured image in blog posts element while the default blog page displays the video and gallery components themselves and that looks pretty cool.
– excerpts in the blog posts element are not what I defined in the posts, they are usually shorter about one paragraph and no media is displayed. The default blog page does this right, it displays the full excerpt including images, videos, posts sliders cool stuff.

I don’t want to go on with these differences like this.

Can you please give me suggestions how the create the desired behavior?

Thanks

Mark