Comment 8 for bug 1067416

oh no, hang on my mistake - just realised that the paths in my ftdetect symlinks are not correct (missing ../). Corrected them and it now works!!! So, yes, that was the problem.
I have also removed the addition to the runtimepath of after/plugin as well as the symlinks, so all I have now are the symlinks in .vim/ftdetect and the line in .vimrc that adds the UltiSnips directory to the runtimepath and it all works fine now.
Thank you so much for helping me along with this