Thank you for the time you have spent researching the issue and providing us with this feedback. Such efforts by our clients are greatly appreciated and do not go unnoticed. I can assure you the shared information will most definitely be taken into consideration moving forward with resolving this task.
From my investigations and experimentation, the issue goes beyond setting inline and is css.
The problem appeared to be that the styles were not cascading correctly, regardless of where they were defined. In my case, the element selector for table/td was interfering with other class's setting the properties previously defined within the selector. (border)