Thanks for the in-depth analysis, I love the feedback and suggestions! To start, I agree that Crash Out! as a mechanic can be pretty broken. The idea behind Crashing Out! was supposed to act like a big table flip in case luck wasn't going your way as well as adding a new flavor to a character. But if used to powergame, especially with how it's written currently (as I forgot to include it in the document). A player can theoretically use it to skip the climax scenario. This is obviously unintentional and I do think that changing it from an instant success to 4 successes would solve that issue.
Otherwise, I really like all of your other suggestions. I personally love the idea of Chaos tying in with success and failure. In fact, more mechanical crunch is something we were originally going to add, but we had to cut it out due to scope. Initially, the game actually revolved around completing side objectives, as every character would have some type of personal goal they had to complete. This actually leads to the possible outcome that you would be unable to reach the pop-up at the end. But we viewed that as a good outcome, as a big theme about the game is that it’s not about the destination but the journey.