Character Movement, Pathfinding and Avoidance

I just enabled avoidance for my NavMesh-bound characters for the first time.

To be honest, I find the results less than impressive… Characters move in weird ways or circle around when they get close to each other. They also walk off edges all the time.

I tried different values for the consideration radius, but without improvement.

So my question is: does this always happen when I use avoidance or are there settings that will make character movement more “natural” and force them to stay on the NavMesh? Otherwise I would rather disable “inter-character” collisions entirely.