I was thinking about the cost issue, and I came up with a new idea for how to solve it, you can simply take "blood_and_tears" or "blood and tears" and use the ASCII codes for each character, in decimal format. In fact, you could even use your original blood & tears! since all characters would be converted into numbers before the game engine parsed them. So, as it turns out, your cost was perfectly fine, but your character encoding was not supported; here is what I get for the characters in ASCII codes:
Code:
cost     981081111113238321161019711411533
The most likely issue for this value is that it will cause an overflow, depending on what numeric data type has been used for the 'cost' value. I suspect that it is a short integer (8 bit) and will overflow above about 32,000, but extensive testing would be required to determine this.

About the team not showing up: one thing that I would try is setting the dev_forum_visible: option in preferences.txt to true, since it starts as false, which could be related to not being able to find the mod team:
Code:
dev_forum_visible:TRUE
Have you checked to see if you have an extra 'barracks' building card in the settlement? This could be part of the issue, if you haven't made a new one, and placed it in the \data\ui\ folder.