^L is not a part of Org specification for paragraph separators.According to https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html#Paragraphs, paragraph boundaries should either be empty lines, or beginning of otherOrg elements.
Fair enough. If the consensus from others is that ^L should be recognised as a paragraph separator and the code is eventually written to make that work, that would be nice, but as it stands I can just start adding newlines after ^L.
Thanks for your work on Org mode! Matt