Missing assets (“reference to an asset engine cannot find”) should never cause UE4 Editor to crash & become permanently unusable. Missing assets usually produce a warning message, so I assume that whatever’s causing Editor to crash is a bug in engine itself.
crashes literally started happening instant I introduced another layer to my Character BP and Anim BP, and started adding functionality to new layers, which involved renaming some functions. From that point on, compiling my Character BP began crashing Editor, and my Anim BP became so unstable that I couldn’t even delete a node without Editor crashing. This really appears to be a bug in engine itself.
fact that my testbed project has entire Kite demo in it shouldn’t make it any more difficult for a programmer to track down a crash. Visual Studio will just trigger an exception, and from there programmer can take a look at what caused crash.
I would think that your engine programmers would want to know that there’s a defect in engine that can cause Editor to become permanently unstable, and would be glad to have a project where crashes can be reproduced so that they can track down cause and fix bug.