I finally discovered how to allow the user to enter newlines directly into edit_fields without having to type CTRL+J:
f:edit_field {height_in_lines = 5, allow_newlines = true}
Similarly, in custom metadata tagsets, you can duplicate the functionality of the "Large Caption" preset:
{'com.adobe.caption', height_in_lines = 15, allow_newlines = true, topLabel = true}
This undocumented feature hasn't been posted in these forums (according to Google), but after the fact I see that a number of others discovered this years ago, at least with respect to metadata tagsets:
http://regex.info/Lightroom/Meta/JustPeek=Jeffrey/Jeffrey
Customising Adobe Lightroom metadata field names | Malc Raggett's Photo Blog