I think there is some confusion here.  I don't think we need any of this escaping happening.  The reason this is escaped in the code is because when you want to represent a double quote in Java as a String, you need to escape it _in the code_ to represent it properly.  We don't want these escaped in the actual properties object, nor do we want the escape characters to appear in the user interface, etc.  You should be able to treat them exactly as they are entered.  So we should remove all of the methods around escaping, and any escaping of strings.