No worries thanks for taking the time

No worries, thanks for taking the time! Right now I'm trying to isolate the difference between messages that are 'said' because those appear to be processed fully correctly and don't break anything whether they have < > or whatever, and directly sending messages via the python interpreter which does. Also some other forms of message echoing. It's clear parsing is applying on one but not the other.

So this is the kind of bizarre thing I'm running into:

class CmdTest2(BaseCommand):
    """Test."""
    key = "test2"

    def func(self):
        args = self.args.strip()
        caller = self.caller
        caller.msg("<break")

caller.msg("<break") is the EXACT SAME as calling self.msg("<break") from the python shell - or at least it really, really should be.
well, i just installed mushclient to test and it doesn't happen there. how is that possible when the implementations of mxp are presumably the same between clients?