Discord tends to be far more active than these forums, so I recommend it for posting issues.
While it is fine to complain about the lack of consistency when using "dark elves" vs "tribal elves", the main reason these things go unfixed is because there is a lot of text spread across many files, so it is easy to miss a few cases. It can make things significantly less tedious if you provide examples as well. That said, I have found 3 cases across 2 files.
The race lock issues are known issues and are not directly related to tribal elves. The core issue was that "race lock" searched the label text for the race and that was shorted to just the file name to avoid text spam. The secondary and ongoing issue is that many portrait packs still use the 0.5.25 race names rather than the 1.0 race names. I have yet to try to solve that issue for them, as I have been short on time and was hoping they could fix it themselves.
"the mod" is rather ambiguous, but if you meant the Improved Random Portraits Mod then that mod has no effect on manual image selection so there is no reason for it to help with "race lock". If you meant the Transition Mod, that mod only sought to remedy old race data in save files.
Edit: spelling