I am using Big Caslon 25px and all uppercase for course titles on cards. I noticed that numbers and parentheses are rendered in capitalized lowercase(?...and no I'm not drinking), So a title i.e. "Level 3", the 3 is the same height as the lowercase letters, it actually looks smaller, almost subscript.
To remedy, you have to change the number to standard case.

So the question is, is this something in the CSS handling or the way SD renders the code?

Check out the attached photo...

That's to do with the font not Site Designer
try Baskerville

or go into text editor highlight the number and increase the font size (but this is not really the ideal way to do it using in-line editor

Thanks, that's sort of what I did, just changed it from all caps to standard and everything acted as expected.