Why is deleting cookies so difficult in Safari? Any solution?

I want to go through my cookies in Safari and delete most of them except for sites where I need them, such as forums and so forth. I have over 5,000 cookies. I'm finding going through them and deleting the ones I don't want, to be excruciatingly difficult.

First of all, the window where it shows the list of cookies is tiny and only allows me to view and delete 6 or 7 at a time. It won't let me expand the window.

Second, while I go though the list and try to highlight ones I want to delete, it basically goes primate-excrement and jumps to different places in the list randomly. I'll be highlighting cookies that start with "z" and then suddenly the window jumps up to the ones that start with "i", and so forth. It keeps on doing this sort of thing and it often makes it impossible to delete more than 1 at a time. It will take me many hours going at this rate.

Also, ones that I've deleted seem to reappear sometimes.

Is there any easier way to delete them? Or, is there any way to do something like, have all cookies deleted after a certain period of time except for a whitelist of my frequented sites?