Hi TommyBear,
This particular issue has been fixed internally. When I ran a quick test in one of our latest internal builds, the component was still usable, and did not cause any crashes after its code class was changed and a hot reload performed.
There has been a lot of work put into improving hot reload recently, especially in relation to Blueprints. If you have built the Engine from source code, these two commits were associated with this particular issue. You can merge those into your Engine source code to see if they help, though there may be additional commits I am unaware of that are needed to get it to work correctly.