Okay, I've been editing startpos and dicovered something worth looking at in your files.

All the vital entries are in the form (brackets for clarity only)
<Setsomething><colon><colon><TAB><sometimes more tabs><entries>

The "Setsomething" words are all slightly different lengths. In the case of <SetNeighbours::>, the gap between the second colon and the start of the data is only about the width of a space character.

At first I typed a space here...
I had to go back and correct this by substituting a tab. I've no idea what difference it makes but the program may be set to seek tab characters as column seperators.

The startpos file is inconsistent though. In one other place, there were 12-13 spaces after the label, one tab, then the data (tradeable goods and resources section).

The way to tell them apart is to insert a tab and watch to see if the data text 'jumps' across to the next tab stop. Your cursor will also be at a tab stop but may appear to have only moved a short distance. It's tricky to describe but the gap between the cursor and the data text 'expands' after you've inserted a tab. What you just inserted is to the left of the cursor, so the thing 'expanding' is a character not typed by you. (I hope this makes sense).

Anyway, simply backspace any excess tabs until the data entries align with the lines above/below.