I’ve had Play+ for 1 week and I’m also blown away by how fast and fun and creative this thing is. I’ve owned many, many grooveboxes, samplers and drum machines over the last 25 years or so and I’ve never fallen so hard, so fast for a machine before. That said, I do have to agree, this thing is buggy. My experience has not been as rough as OP’s but I’m still regularly experiencing issues. For me, crashing during custom sample loading is the worst. I’ve been building Play formatted sample packs and most of the time, on my first attempt to load the pack it crashes early during the loading… but then I power it off, power it back on, load the same sample pack and it loads just fine. Anyway, just wanted to add my voice to the sentiment of this post. Personally, I am most definitely keeping mine and praying for a massive firmware update!
EDIT: OP’s mention about “character length” led me to this thread Freeze whilst loading sample packs, folders or files which exceed 32 char
Many of my samples have very long filenames, early tests indicate that truncating those filenames does seem to help!