Then why did you need to go back in and change it again?
To solve the first problem
.
The directions are clear in Control Panel > Paths & Database..

Quote
MySQL Full Unicode Support (utf8mb4)
Sets the character set when sending data from and to the database server to utf8mb4 (full unicode support). Confirm that your table collations are utf8mb4 (eg. utf8mb4_general_ci) before enabling.

MySQL by default only uses a three byte encoding and so values in the four byte range (eg. Asian characters and Emojis) can not be stored. Any attempt to enter a text that contains four byte characters will result in those characters being returned as errors. MySQL does provide full four byte UTF-8 support, but it requires certain database settings to be configured. Converting to utf8mb4_unicode_ci is preferred. 4-Byte UTF-8 Unicode requires MySQL 5.5.3 or above.

Before you do anything again I would suggest you wait for a response from the programmers.