Passive stats, yes. Procs (the effects that have a % chance to occur) don't AFAIK. They're supposed to be melee only.
Yes, and your point is (because I don't know whether you are trying to tell me that I'm wrong or just stating the obvious)? Because there was a version of DoD when it did work like that, and whether it does now I know not because I haven't bothered to check (haven't used Assassination with ranged weaponry for quite some time).
targethiteffectbuff occurs when the player hits in melee, crossbowshotbuff occurs when the player shoots his crossbow. They're not really interchangable. You could have a crossbowshotbuff effect that does special stuff at point blank range, but that involves triggers and anchored templates. What you said made it sound like targethiteffectbuffs could somehow proc on crossbowshots or that it was supposed to work that way. What you said did not make such sense.
Well, it is possible that it worked that way for the time because it was broken in that particular version. I certainly can't discount the possibility of that happening. I haven't received the answer I was trying to get, though (maybe because I was tired and could've phrased it in an unfortunate way), so I'll just assume it's working as intended now and doesn't have any point-blank shot hiccups.
The only possibility of what you describe happening I can imagine is from a monster attacking you in melee and you counterattack on a turn that you fired a crossbow shot.
What can I say, in ancient times even DoD's triggers worked in a weird way. Maybe it just used a different method of detecting what "isn't a ranged attack". And besides, that was in a really old version, one from before your mods even got famous (heck, it's possible that your Clockwork Knight wasn't even out yet then, but I'm not certain if that was the case).
