Might have been my version but the last change you mentioned stopped my titles/desc from saving?
So I reverted back to your previous hack - which means I miss out on the re-ordering which is a pain.
For the wysiwg adding an extra <p> to the block of code. I went into the javascript (its the jd.gallery.js in the smoothgallery folder then the js folder) and changed all the 'p' and "p" to spans so fixed. As the <p><p>text here</p></p> was causing the text to not appear.
