^ is XOR, not raised to power. Do-more uses C/C++/C#/java syntax in its MATH expressions, so ^ is XOR.
However, those languages do not have a raised-to-power operator, so we stole one from the old BASIC language, ** (two asterisks).
So try 2 * 2 ** 2. You will see the automagic placement of the parentheses as you expected: 2 * (2 ** 2)