Best practises for defining EDD for <note> with a prefix

Dear FM experts. I am using FM2020, with structured DITA. I inherited everything from someone else, and I am not sure if the way that things are set up are considered "best practise" or not.

For example, we use the <note> element which includes a prefix depending on the value of an attribute. When authoring, some of the <note> elements were written with just text, and others used a <p> element to hold the note content. Initially, both of these resulted in the same desired output, where the prefix appears at the start of the note content. However, at some point the EDD files were changed and the output of these two were different. I eventually traced this change to the following TextRulesFormatting for the <p> element, which had been removed:

• Part of the <p> element in the EDD:

  • TextRulesFormatting

    • ContextRule

      • If {first} < note

        • TextRangeFormatting

          • TextRange

Below you can see the difference in output with and without the TextRulesFormatting

Q1: what is best practises for DITA? Allowing content editors to enter in the content of the note via two different methods (i.e. within a <p> or not within a <p>) or forcing them to enter using just plain text?

Q2: why does that TextRulesFormatting have the impact it does (i.e. what does TextRangeFormatting do when there are no formatting commands added to it...?)