I think I figured out the problem. I didn’t realize that under “users” – you can turn off the rich-text editing per user. This basically lets you enter in the content as raw HTML. You can write in the paragraph tags manually or just press “enter” manually to go to a new line. If you don’t enter in the paragraph tags – it won’t put them into the table when it inserts the data, but WP will still use its “wpautop” function to automatically insert the paragraph tags when it renders the data as HTML. If you do enter in the paragraph tags manually – it will leave them in the data when it’s inserted into the table and WP will render the data as HTML correctly (meaning it won’t try to insert another set of paragraph tags along with the ones manually inserted). This also allows it to work with my custom template/layout.
