For all my details/sections/etc I use 3dclip and the old hidden visual style via -shademode
3DCLIP interface sucks a big one, in my opinion, and every year I suggest something about it to AUGI and the newsgroups but nothing comes of it. Responses on the newsgroup vary from "There's nothing wrong with it, the problem is you" to "yea I agree, but I don't care that much about it" and I haven't really seen it hit the AUGI survey yet.
Just gotta suck it up, man, is all I can say. zoom way out to find the planes, move them close... zoom in, move them closer, zoom in more, move them closer, repeat until they're in the right place, turn the clipping planes ACTIVELY ON, and get out of the window. Should be it. Dimension away.
Autocad is also sucky at producing geometry of sliced solids in some cases. They're not actually 'solids' but hollow objects with only faces defined. They imitate solids. So when you have a clipping plane going through a solid to show it's cross section, often, but not always, I find it doesn't draw the cross section. That's particularly AWESOME (sarcasm) when you're trying to detail steel beam connections and the beam's profile disappear!