The strange thing to me about the falsely awarded commendations is they're not consistent. If it was just giving them out too easily, you'd think any soldier that meets the false criteria would get it, but it seems random. Also I noticed for example that the Order of the Hammer award was falsely awarded, but when I used the ctrl+c it wasn't re-awarded on the next mission even though I hadn't deleted it from the ruleset. Strange. The rulesets seem fine as far as I can tell, so I assume the problem is in the code and someone with C++ knowledge would have to correct it.
That might be why I haven't fixed any of these ;p
As others have said (thanks guys!), "Improvisation" is the logic not knowing what happened. You can modify the string in your files to read something more appropriate; I was being a little cheeky when I decided on that term!
Regarding kills involving fire and stuff: fire hardly ever kills in vanilla XCOM. And tracking who lit what on fire meant breaking all the saves, because of the way tiles are saved or something. Thinking it is more pleasing to have your awesome fire kill awarded (and a few erroneous kills) rather than not having that awesome fire kill awarded, I went with a pretty relaxed system. Any unit who gets hit by something remembers who last hit them; then, if that unit dies, the last person who hit them gets a credit for the kill. It's not great, but as I can't track who started what fire, I can't track who kills who via fire properly.
Regarding cause of death: I think that's only used in the 'fallen soldiers' screen after missions. Come to think of it, it should probably show up in the memorial screen too.
I have an old running list of bugs and things I want to look at here :
https://gist.github.com/Shoes01/3af40f402d287ae9c229. I have myself the note "MAJOR BUG: The last entry in a the kill "and" criteria is the only one being looked at." pinned as the bug responsible for commendations like Mercy Cross and Taking Names being awarded incorrectly. It's a public gist, so feel free to add comments below about other things I need to look at; it's much cleaner than skimming through discussions in this thread
As for your second thread, it would best fit here; stat tracking is officially part of OXC as Warboy and SupSuper maintain it, but the commendations is still my mod. I have some commendations source code in the base game, but that's because I am their favourite modder (I don't need my own subforum!). So yeah, Mind Control commendations were some of the last ones added, so they got the least amount of testing. The main profile screen uses vanilla XCOM code to track kills, I decided not to touch that in an effort to minimize code impact; vanilla XCOM did not give you kills for MC kills, it seems. I do though; they are tracked as slaveKills or something. Killing an MC with an MC is untested; I didn't think of that. When you say "mission screen", do you mean the little popup that reads time of day, alien race, etc; or do you mean the debriefing screen at the end of a mission? If it's the latter, that's vanilla code. If it's the former, then I am surprised that it's in one part but not another. I will add it to my list of things todo!
By design, it's only the profile screen that has vanilla code, and will be different from the rest of the diary. However, come to think of it, since the stat tracking is now 'official', I suppose the three place should indeed be consistent. I am going to add myself a note to fix that too. **
You're covering a lot of corner cases with MC kills, so I am not sure how my "last to hit an alien gets the kill credit" and "I am an MC slave and I killed myself" interact with eachother. Does the MCer get the kill, the last soldier that happened to hit the MCd? This also seems related to your bug. The two systems might be conflicting with eachother.
Regarding neutralizations, I forget if I ever built in an anti abuse system, where stunning an alien repeatedly gave you more stun awards or not... I think I have systems in place now that can prevent that, but I am not sure if I wrote code to make the two interact. I did not spend much time making sure the commendations could not be cheesed, so this may be a result of that.
But yeah, I appreciate the attention you're giving this! I always enjoy talking about this mod :3 some day I will come back to it and tinker some more.
** edit: I reread what you were saying, and the mission popup only lists the total kills for that mission; it won't list the total kills over the soldier's career. I will still look into it to see if it's somehow overlooking certain kill types.