Run in place still requires a button press by default currently, its thumb pad like all of the other movement modes. You could use it without the button requirement but sudden sustained vertical movements like crouching up and down can trigger it with the default settings. Also the default settings take the controllers movements into account as well when calculating thresholds, there is a boolean to turn that off which will require no hand motion. (Unless I broke it by mistake recently when remapping buttons, I can run through it tonight)
Syncing up to the latest plugin is sadly not as fluid as I would like due to the binary status of blueprints, you would be best off keeping a seperate copy of the new version and moving nodes over. You could subclass from the character and move it over wholesale but its mostly intended as an example character. For games its likely you could delete most of the movement modes and many of the features to have a bare bones character.