Get WP to use p & br tags in pages/posts

Ok. Until the update to 4.3, I’ve been using the plugin PS Disable Auto Formatting, so that <p> and <br /> are inserted with returns & shift-returns, and not stripped out when publishing/updating.

With 4.3, that plugin causes an issue where it’s impossible to switch to the text editor from visual editor, and the plugin author is not responding to the issue.

This is driving me and my (very non-technical) clients crazy!

I have tried a number of other plugins, but they don’t seem to do what I’m needing, and I’m not sure I understand anymore exactly what WP is trying to do when it’s being “helpful” but NOT. Am I wanting to “disable wpautop”? Or something else?

When I hit return, I want that to be the end of one paragraph, and the beginning of another. With shift-return, I want a line break. I want WP to stop stripping out these tags when I add them manually.

Can someone point be toward a plugin or snippet that will get WP to do this?

Is this what I want to do?
remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');