Problem with SEO Smart Links and HTML element attributes

I recently encountered a problem involving SEO Smart Links where it’s adding escape characters to double quotes as part of the prevention of links in heading elements. This issue has been reported here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/html-error-in-link
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/plugin-seo-smart-links-problems-with-headings
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/cant-align-h1-text-on-center

Now, I realize turning off the “prevent linking in heading tags” option can prevent the problem from happening, but I’m not sure this is what I want to do.

Some web research turned up these pages:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2060776/remove-escaped-quotes-from-wordpress-posts
(See answer #2)

https://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/forum/plugins/seo-smart-links-fix-for-you-seo-smart-links-plugin

The reason I’m starting this thread is because I don’t want to modify the plugin source code only to have those changes removed with the next plugin upgrade/update.

My questions are:

1) Do the above code changes make sense?
2) If they do, is there a chance to get them implemented in a future release of SEO Smart Links?
3) Is it possible to update the plugin to more accurately detect a anchor element inside a heading element and make the appropriate adjustment to the generated HTML?

What I need to code is:

<h3 id=”special”>Heading text</h3>

I’m not wanting to code this:

<h3>Heading text</h3>

Since the H3 element without the embedded anchor doesn’t have the anchor, the quotes in the “id” attribute shouldn’t be touched.

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance!

Peace…

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/