Thanks John,
I have not been able to test your initial email suggestion. Going to do that over the weekend. But if Elliot knows, that would be best.
It seems that if you are going to use acf_form() w/o the <form> markup, it would be best, or at least be a good option, to also disable any JS that checked for the form being altered before navigating away. That should be left up to the form developer to do that check or not.