How can I delete some, but not all, emails in the conversation view

I like conversation view, but I’d like to be able to cleanup / remove older messages - when I open one of the older ones and hit the ‘delete’ key, right click on it and say ‘delete’, or select ‘Delete’ from the pull down menu from the upside-down triangle icon on the right, it deletes the whole thread.
2nd option - even more useful to me would be a to remove all emails included in other emails (except for side-threads or emails w/ attachments that were dropped in later emails).

So far, I have found that I can disable conversation view and do it, but that’s a bit of a chore.