i'm an elisp newbie, so i don't have a working patch yet. i imagine it involves either (remove-text-properties ...) or copying the text with no properties. someone want to point in the right direction?
ok, i figured it out. here's a quick patch that will remove the read-only property. i'd have thought it would retain the intangible bit, but i guess not.
i'm using (propertize ...) which is non-destructive. i imagine that symbol-at-point is a copy already, so a destructive op should use less space. again, i'm still new at this. ;)