The whole-block regexes in the sentinel passes (page breaks, paragraph
styles/boxes, text effects, whitespace collapse) matched a self-closing
<text:p/> too — [^>]* happily ends in a slash — and then swallowed everything
up to the next real closing tag, so an empty cell paragraph took the restyle
meant for a later paragraph's sentinel and that paragraph lost it. The
opening-tag pattern now rejects self-closing tags.