Cannot create the "old style alias" <path-to-original-node>_<mid>

Originally reported by isaachorton here: #974684: Broken bulk generate aliases for nodesymlinks in Pathauto 1.x.

Before my nodesymlinks alias looked like:

/path/of/original/location/title_3427 (the _3427 was added by nodesymlinks and is the mid)

but after updating ALL my nodesymlinks links look like:
/Branded Manufacturer / News & Events / In The News
(so its not loading the original alias with the appended mid, instead it loads the menu trail but with capital letters and spaces. on some pages the %20's appear as well.

maybe im doing something wrong but i tried all the other path replacement options and no luck getting it to display like it did before??

While the aliases work for me, the new path structure is breaking my css throughout the site and creating inconsistent linking patterns. Yikes!

Everything seems to be resolving correctly though and so the navigation is functional.

My site's css depend on the path locations being consistent from the original node to the nodesymlinks alias. The old way was working fabulously for me, my only problem was the added ampersands....

At this point it's safer for me to backtrack to the older version of the module and just deal with the ampersands.