Water VS. Cat

My cat is about 8 months old.  When he was 5 weeks or so, he was found in the middle of Broad Street in Philadelphia, and a good samaritan brought him here for care.  A few weeks later I adopted him and took him home, and very quickly we discovered that while he is sometimes sweet, he is also BAD.  We named him Hannibal Barca, AKA Hannibal the Annihilator.
He bites.  He scratches.  He jumps on the counter and the table, hooks himself onto the screen door and climbs, chews on our wooden clothes dryer, rips apart cardboard boxes with his teeth and eats ANYTHING.  He stood on a hot stove just today to snatch some of my butternut squash risotto.  So how do we deal with it?
Well, I bought a water sprayer from the Dollar Tree, and we squirt him with water whenever he does something bad.  Is he up on the counter?  Spray the water at him.  Is he biting Bella's ear, our oldest cat?  Spray him with the water.  I kid you not, he is soaking wet most of the time.  So, is it really working?  Does it curb his behavior?
For one thing, he is afraid of the noise that the sprayer makes.  If I'm using window cleaner, Hannibal runs away at the noise.  On the other hand, now he really likes hanging out in the bathroom when I take a shower.  He bats at the water vapor and loves to rub and get his fur on me when I get out.  So he's afraid of the sound, but not the water.
I spoke with our bookkeeper, who uses a canned air sprayer (like a keyboard cleaner) to curb her cat's behavior.  She said it's most important to not get the air bottle TOO close, since it comes out really cold, but it works.  I also spoke with a nurse here who has a really bad cat, Ollie (who also spent some of his kitten hood living here).  He doesn't use a water sprayer, and heard that it only teaches the animals to be good when you're home.
I remember using a water sprayer on our cat Freckles when I was growing up.  She really liked the shower, too. Do you see a pattern emerging?  Actually, once she hit about a year old, we didn't really need the water sprayer anymore.  It seemed to be adulthood that made her stop being mischievous.
I hope one day we don't have to shut him in the spare room at night, and I suppose the answer for Hannibal is to keep disciplining him, letting him know what's right and wrong, and perhaps, someday, I'll have a kitchen floor without water sprinkles all over it.
-Amy