you'll find that with these long, competition style frames that when you are cycling along all of your weight is on your arms. i find that once i am up on the back wheel it becomes really light on the front and will sit on the back wheel quite happily. you just need to get used to muscling the front up at first. life is much easier once your front wheel is up on the balancing point.
as for your sidehops, if you are lowering your front wheel quite low, it will feel like it is hard to get the front wheel nice and high to get it up on to the object you are wanting to sidehop onto. ive found that instead of lowering the front wheel right down i just bend my legs into it more and get all of my lift from there.
i think you should try and get used to your set up beacuse shorter stems etc will just make it worse on the back wheel. just play about on the bike until you are happy with it. if you cant get used to it then you should think about changing parts around. hope this helps.
Dave