The bonuses for the Artificial Slave Center and the Galactic Bazaar are hardcoded and linked directly to the InternalName of both improvements. The strength of the bonus can be adjusted via the Ability Factor.

In other words, both improvements are working correctly.

As for what the Galactic Bazaar does, it increases the value of all your items during a trade with another race by 50%. For example, if you offer 100bc to the other race, then it will give you goods worth 150bc in return.

Yes. DI is SM, for all intents and purpose.

In your example, no, the bonuses of DI will be applied. However, this seems to be different depending on who initiated the trade. For example, if the other race had initiated the trade, then the bonus of SM would get applied. I don't know why that is the case.

Yeah, that is weird. There really seems to be no consistency in how the game applies the bonuses. One time, it works as you expect, and the next time, it's completely different, even under the same circumstances. Baffling, to say the least.

That's how it originally was. It got changed in order to reduce the effects of a "bug" with the minor races.

The minor races lose access to techs that are declared unique to a major race. For example, the Arceans don't have access to any of the standard propulsion techs beyond Hyperdrive. In a 1vs1 match between them and the Drengin, those techs will be declared unique to the Drengin (because they are the only major race with access to them). All the minor races on the map will not be able to research those techs.

This "bug" is the effect of a mechanic Stardock added during the beta for TotA in order to address the concerns a lot of players had with the minor races having access to race-specific techs. Once the minors got their own tech tree, the mechanic was no longer necessary, but remained in place for some reason. Probably because Stardock forgot about it. 

In any case, in my mod, Autumn Twilight, I changed Stellar Production and Xeno Slavery (Drengin/Korath) back to be independent techs again. I'm also currently working on a new version, where I did that with all of the affected techs.

Are you sure? I just had a look and Xeno Biology clearly showed PopulationGrowth (10) under Civ. Ability Bonuses.

No, that was always the case in TotA.

Yes, that's the right file.

No, all of the ability bonuses are set in the TechTree.xml, and can be freely changed. Some of the race-specific tech trees have modifications to those values, like it is the case with Planetary Improvements (Stellar Production) and Space Militarization (Defense Industries) for the Thalan.

It's ok as long as you don't save. (it'll ask you if you exist everytime...) because the TechEditor will create new lines of code which will affect techtrade and some idiotic placeholder remarks even when you do nothing but click on a tech to seep through it.... 

there is a 100% consistency of how the game works, (short of random number generators which are nowhere near techtrading) because the code is 100% the same.

if a tech is researched & traded, no matter who initiated that trade, its bonuses will be applies.

a tech that is overwritten will never have its bonuses applied.

this is very logical because why should you get the bonuses of a tech when you never researched it?

however, depending on who initiated the trade, this is not correctly displayed, which is perhaps the reason for your false assumption.

thus, the homogenization of the techtree in the CU just created more bugs, and although they are just graphical, still add to the confusing of even old players.

I'm also baffled that, just because of the Minors, major Stock Races got  nerfed. Esp since this could have been remedied much clean & easy, without causing more bugs.

I find using Notepad++ much easier. You can't even copy+paste techs in the editor. Every new tech you make needs to be done from scratch. Even if it is an iteration of a previous tech.

I just tried it (opening a copy of one of my tech trees and immediately saving it), because I haven't actively used the Tech Editor since TotA came out. The result was that the editor removed all of the comments in the file, added the DisplayName tag to all techs, using the base TechTree.xml as a reference point (so some techs are now called "TODO: display name"), removed a few Requires tags, and added a Alignment and Requires tag to a tech that had neither before (and also has neither in the base game). So, yeah, I wouldn't recommend using the Tech Editor.

Well, the Improvement Editor currently has a bug. However, that's due to the CU, and not the editor itself. The CU added a couple improvements with identical InternalNames, which the editor can't handle. It shows the correct number of improvements, but if you try to make any changes, then they will only apply to the first entry of the building. For example, if you want to edit all of the Entertainment Networks, then the changes only apply to the Terran version (because it's the first entry in the file). The Arcean, Korx, and Minor Race version remain unchanged.

Yeah, I often wished the game had that.

No idea. I'm not a programmer. In any case, we don't have access to the source-code, so we can't do this ourselves (at least not legally). I also doubt that Stardock is willing to spend programming-time to add that feature in.

In techtree.xml the Civ. Ability is stated correctly:

   <PopulationGrowthAbility>10</PopulationGrowthAbility>

But the editor doesn't show it.  Xeno Medicine is identical in form and it shows correctly in the editor. 

Since the editor won't even display techtree.xml (at least mine won't), and munges what it can edit, then this is a worthless pursuit.  I'll just ignore it.

I think most -if not all- already got corrected in the version that's been recently sent to SD, just hold on for a final update