Hi Ryan,
I think, there is a principal problem with pasting some text into an article.
I made a video doing this:
Opening an Joomla article in edit mode via JCE 2.8.10-rc2
Copy the article-title via popup-crtl-v to the clipboard.
Pasting in the text via the popup-option (... as clear text).
This opens a popup which tells me that I should paste the text via crtl-v into the popup-window-area.
Doing this, the text is filled in as normal text, without any tags or visible formats.
When selecting the insert-button ot the popup, the text is pasted into the article at cursor-position, but it is then surrounded by a p-tag.
That look to me, that is is not pasted as ... as clear text