Delete pairs of a string

[DevonVille]

First things first - I love the behavior of this plugin. It's exactly what I wanted.

Yet, I have two issues:
first, is the electric-pair-mode in emacs 24 I just can't seem to automatically disable.
I tried (electric-pair-mode nil) and (setq electric-pair-mode nil) and they both failed.
Any ideas?

Second is deletion behavior - if I have autowrap on, I kind of expect being able to toggle the pairs. pressing C-space, for example, to remove the pairs completely, or pressing Space-' to change my double quotes (") to single quotes.

Even when I'm next to a pair in either side, deleting it keeps the other one intact - only when there is no text in between does it delete its pair.