Gotta admit, the crash was my fault. Tried to make a funny little change for him but didn't account for an extra reference in the actual map file (which I can't edit with my limited methods)
It's fixed now and was also a good excuse for him to get updated to E18.2 which is a plus.
As for the friendship evolutions, from what I can tell that's not the fault of a mod or anything, it's actually a bug (or possibly design decision) in Reborn itself
Pokemon don't gain the friendship they're supposed to from levelling up if it's in battle and they aren't the active pokemon. This applies