Issue: htmlawed and storing sanitized data in the database

I'm working on a Elgg (1.11.2) backend intended for use as an API for a mobile client. The problem I'm having is the "sanitation" of input. When sending messages through a web service, characters such as < or > become &lt; and &gt; and get stored in the database as such. This was obviously done with HTML in mind, however this practice of storing santized data in the database is generally shunned* even in common, HTML use cases. In my case (displaying messages on Android), the messages are not even displayed in HTML and are displayed incorrectly:

For now, I have disabled the htmlAwed plugin, however that's not a solution. While my code might then do its own sanitation when needed, I can not rely on core code doing the same. Also, this might work if I was only using the web services API, but I also use the web interface as an admin-backend, and I need the core code to be safe. Another solution might be to de-sanitize every time when loading data from the database in order to serve it to mobile client, but that's more of a hack than a solution. If I could somehow disable it only for web services, that would be an acceptable solution (although still not good for the framework on the whole), although I would still likely need to mess with the core WS code.

* A cursory search for "htmlspecialchars in database" (since htmlspecialchars performs similar function to htmlAwed plugin) gives plenty results advising not to store sanitised data in the database:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/4882317/1358631

http://stackoverflow.com/a/28859383/1358631

http://stackoverflow.com/a/7245495/1358631

http://stackoverflow.com/a/14148954/1358631

 

Should I open this up as an issue on github?