Brian you can do it by using "display_value" attribute.
eg. if you have a HTML description field which is coming out as quoted HTML you can do this to display value as non-quoted
template::element create $form_id survey_description \
-datatype text \
-widget text \
-label "[_ smart-forms.Description]" \
-value "$survey_description" \
-mode $mode \
-display_value "$survey_description"
You don't even need the noquote tag...