5.4.3 Rendering crashes

Like everything else in my UE experience - Crashreal Engine continues.
My setup: 5.4.3 VR/NoLumen/Nanite/Water Plugin
Setting up VR gave me very bad performance, so I followed XR Best Practices in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.4 Documentation | Epic Developer Community
Switching to Forward Rendering crashes water becase of OpaqueTexture not available at Slot9. Using Instanced Stereo crashes the editor on play on IsInRenderingThread or something.
Recreating the whole setup on 5.3 works like a charm - but I cannot downgrade my assets, so I have to start from scratch. Leaving engine at Deferred without Instanced Stereo yields “bearable” FPS, BUT WITH SHADOWS ONLY IN THE LEFT EYE OF QUEST2 HMD. So to get performance and actual shadows I need forward - to get forward I have to remove water and remake it with another water solution or rebuild my scene from scratch using 5.3. Any docs on that? No. Any forum posts? Yes: accepted answer is “5.4 water kills editor”.
Should have never left Unity.

I feel for you! I’ve been working with 5.4 and I’ve had a few problems with it for sure. I seem to have gotten around most things for the time being. From what I’ve heard the water plug-in is very bad for performance. I think because it’s rendering as a sort of volume that has geometry, rather than a plane of material. I have a map I’ve been working on, that’s full of lots of high poly trees, foliage and what not and I’m walking around it with a Metahuman, to boot. Framerate is pretty smooth on my 4090 - then I add in a river with the water plug-in and it starts to get choppy. Water plug-in is the culprit, in my case. Why don’t you look for a water asset on the marketplace, that’s much better for performance? Then you wouldn’t have to downgrade?