"Experimentals are expected to crash all the time."
Ahh, I think that grossly overstates it. I would say more that "It's POSSIBLE a particular experimental might crash" and in my experience anything as gross as a crash is fixed within half a day to a day at most. And the experimentals do have lots of bugfixes that the last Stable version doesn't.
The big plus/minus of experimentals imho is the changed/added features - if you happen to pick up an experimental just after something big went in, it might not be balanced or working 100% over all the possible weird things that can happen in a game of this scope. I usually don't mind that, but if it feels weird I do go check the last few pages of pull requests to see wassup, there's really not much other avenues of notification.
If you're getting fairly far in, and it would seriously bug you if you lost a ton of progress to a crash, DO go set autosaves every 5 or 10 minutes, or at least the question to save when you sleep. Also if you don't want to risk dying to something new and unknown, keep an Explorer window open and periodically save and copy the save directory (ie prepare to "savescum"). It gives me that feeling of safety, even though I almost never use it (I like to start fresh, the early days are the parts I tend to like most - risky, time pressure to get set up, and not piles and piles of stuff to manage, enjoyable as *that* can be when I'm in the mood for it).
And yeah, when reading eyeball how long each period takes and get a feel for what it should be (CLOSEish to the time listed in the book plus your obvious mods) and if it's way off try to figure out what's wrong - tired, bad light, low focus, big negative effects to Int or movement, whatever. And for sure don't read next to a room full of blobs or something, basement or middle of a cleared out area is recommended. Are you saying it takes a minute to learn a whole skill level? That's ... actually not so bad, that's like 10-15 periods even at low skill levels, each of which is about a half hour of game time, and it does get worse from there. A minute to sim 5-10 hours of game time? To me that's not crazy-excessive...