Not long after posting a question here, I was able to solve the problem for the "PayPal Smart Buttons".
It turns out that if you have HTML minification turned on (General Settings), it strips out https from the sdk url.
It converts "https://www.paypal.com/sdk/js" to "//www.paypal.com/sdk/js".
This creates a new issue, since HTML minification is a performance improvement, we have to turn it off and downgrade our performance if we want to use "PayPal Smart Buttons" or anything else that requires "https" within the HTML content to function properly.
This is a defect/bug for HTML minification in Nop.
So the question that has now evolved is how do we turn on HTML minification, without having "https" being stripped out, or at least is there a way to control that within the context of a plugin?