When you open the descriptions.csv file in either notepad or open office you immediately notice that there isn't a comma between "notes" and the first ID of the first description.
The game will run fine if you do not edit it at all, but even pressing enter will break the file completely. Pressing backspace to fix your "mistake" does not help either. You will continually get the FATAL:JSONObject: ["id"] not found error message. So far all I have been able to do to fix the problem is to re-download the game each time.
It must be something from the latest patch because I have always been able to edit the file in the past... come to think of it I think I had to scrap my old descriptions file when the trade update hit. At the time I thought there was just a format change and I would get back to it later... could even be from way back then.
Anyway I will start experimenting more with it to see if I can find out some more info but it looks like there is something weird there that doesn't apply to any of the other csv files such as ships.csv or weapons.csv.
Those seem to be far more flexible in how you can edit them. I have consistently edited them even with the new update using both notepad and open office.
EDIT: Actually all of those files don't have a comma after the end of the descriptor first line and before the first actual data line either.. seems strange to me
but those seem to work ok. Looks like it is simply an issue with any space or editing at all of the descriptions file. I tried just putting a simple space in between the last comma of a line and the id of the next line and it breaks it the same way.