Tim,
I've grown to prefer Donne with original spelling. As you point out, the old elision marks show that his meter is much more regular than is apparent from modern spelling. I wouldn't want to wade through Folio Shakespeare, though.
I have Kermode's edition of Donne, which I find too sparsely annotated. The Arden volume of Lear goes to the opposite extreme, such that the footnotes take up more space than the text. They're good and thorough, but the labourious cross-referencing to the source material, the other plays, & Q vs F are for the scholar not the reader, and it seems unnecessary to explain e.g. that 'ingrateful' mean 'ungrateful' or that 'offices' means 'duties'.
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