Onionfighter, here is a fairly simple solution to your treaty issue.

This code does everything that your code does, and overrides the current treaty. Ok so I know this doesn't look anything like what you are doing here but I will try to explain it a bit. One of the big things about the way elemental handles mods is the way it handles named references. If you want to modify only one part of a reference, you only need to "call" the reference then specify the exact change you want to make. So above, all we are doing is referencing the treaty, and telling the system that this is the calculation we want for this treaty. Now the sake of example, say you wanted to give these modded treaties a duration. All you would do is a single line for the modified duration and the system will use the modified version instead of the regular version. This tends to work for most of the xml files, though game modifiers do not follow this logic as they are loaded immediately and usually require a counter modifier to get rid of the bonus.

Edit: sorry about the odd link there, the forums make 1 *  into

Honestly I have no clue why it works when you replace a little but not when you replace a lot. I would bet there is some kind of check in place that looks at the entry and uses some heuristic to determine if it is the same or different. This check probably doesn't kick in when you don't specify certain fields, like the display name or description. Though honestly, the method I have shown above is a good modding practice so that you are not attempting to override every value of an entry with a duplicate value and future modders can clearly see what changes you are adding.