ok so I had been testing on one environment, have found that you can override the editviewdefs.php within the custom/modules/(modulename)/metadata folder and just set the fields as
‘type’=>‘readonly’
and this has worked just fine… however now - I have a handful of fields that have the above logic applied on our new instance of 8.1 … and oddly enough - only ONE of the fields that I set as readonly, comes through as readonly.
Permissions and all of that are good, ruled out since one works - anyone else seeing issues like this and find a workaround?