I don’t have a student license, so I don’t have a way to test what might be different. I know Autodesk restricts a bunch of stuff which is super annoying. Our guys have been using the tools internally with 2013 and 2014 without issue. We haven’t as a studio moved to 2015 yet, so support there is not as strong as 2013/2014. Not sure what crash you got or what was going on to get the crash.
A note about the unknown node issue. This happens when you’ve been working with the file and saving as an ascii (.ma). The tools then tries to save as a binary and it throws the unknown node issue. For now, it’s recommend to just save as a maya binary from the get go.