HTML entities in titles

this would kill most already working solutions, so it's a no go. You have to use raw tokens.

http://drupal.org/node/242643

a token, which isn't "check_plained" - it contains raw user input. If you use a check_plained token, you get the problems you got.. ;)

but what if the token is a cck field referencing an existing taxonomy term. Then "raw" input isn't an option. What do we do then?

I am not sure if it helps but you can use something similar to the following php code

 return html_entity_decode('[field_texttext-formatted]');

in order to make the HTML entities display properly (i.e. & instead of & amp ;)

#6 does seem to work for me.

I am using content_taxonomy module and it doesn't provide a raw equivalent.

Hm I'm not sure about that. This would change existing configurations to not work as before - it would decode entities that might be wanted (-> double encoded). So this can't get in.