iPhone 5 - iOS7 - Messaging Issues

I've always had problems with communicating on iMessage with other iPhone users.

My whole messaging app ends up lagging up my whole phone.

I thought it was due to the fact I have about 1 gig of texts in my phone, so I went through and manually deleted all of them (We need a delete all feature in iMessage)

Hard-reset my phone, and guess what the texts were back.

Contacted Apple support was trouble shooting for about 30 mins.

Reset my iPhone, reset network settings, allowed my sim card to reauthenticate, tried resending texts and deleting texts by they came right back.

When I send texts they get stuck right before finishing... even if I send them as SMS.

When I delete text messages they reappear after a reboot.

I have 32GB iPhone 5... about 7 gigs avaliable. Really getting sick of this, it's been on-going for sometime now. These phones are too expensive to be messing up like this, especially when Apple makes one phone with the same interface... they should be experts at this now!

I know I'm not the only one with this issue, I've read all around online and nothing has helped me so far.

I believe it's a software issue, and not regarding my carrier or hardware of the iPhone.