Funkiness with Merc Modding in 2.8 Opt In

I'm having some serious issues with Mercenary modding in 2.8 Opt In... so I did NOTHING to my files (GRM-M) for 2.8... I started up a game... everything seems fine... hire a mercenary, no problem, they are all working as intended. Later on... I have a crash. I reload the game from a save...

And alllll the Mercs in the Bazaar go blind... no stats, no images, no ship models... I decide to start a new game... still missing. I open/close GC, restart computer/etc. still missing.

I uninstall and reinstall GC3... I reload the mod as is... the Mercs are back and working... I save, close the game, return, and reload... and ...

And in this state, if you HIRE a Merc... you will not be rewarded, though the blank image will then change to the disabled Merc icon in question correctly.

Here are my concerns and questions...

1. How is it that this is a "intermittent" problem. That seems very very strange to me. 
2. Is anyone else having this problem?
3. I suspect that this has something to do with the Mercenary shipclass definitions being moved to the global GC3 Shipclassdefs.xml from its own Merc xml. I have changed the mod file to directing from the old EXP1_MercenaryShipClassDefs.xml to the ShipClassDefs.xml... you know the top entry of a file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>

<ShipClassList

xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../../../Game/Data/Schema/ShipClassDefs.xsd">

<!-- Created with the Crusade editor -->

<!-- EXP1_ShipClassDefs.xml -->

See that bit? I've changed that to just look at ShipClassDefs.... that may fix the issue, but not for a save and reload... something happens and they go blank again.

Its not seemingly anything to do with the MercenaryDefs file, the MercenaryTierDef files.... or the staticship blueprintfile as far as I can tell....

HALP