I want to keep more formatting intact from the original rss entries. I've found this was a multi-step process.

First, I gave up patching up the existing code for this. After the config fix to htmLawed, I found a lower-level library was also doing sanitizing, so I just re-wrote the whole think in Python:
https://github.com/vincebusam/selfoss/blob/master/scripts/update.py

Then I needed a css hack to fix the display style in the browser:
https://github.com/vincebusam/selfoss/commit/263cb1e556afce066d07ad68a6fffe8a7ed64b3a

It's much more to my liking. Now I just need a way to expand the images and display alt text on mobile.