I rarely get a CTD now while doing stuff in Content Manager. That was an issue early on, but I did some troubleshooting at the time and found that the CTD occurred in the final stages of submitting the assets and closing the Assets.tdx file. While watching the system resources in Task Manager and Process Explorer, I noticed a huge spike in not only CPU usage, but also in RAM with the CPU usage jumping up to 100% and RAM usage sustaining well up to the 80% range. This was with my 64GB too on my system!
My solution to this is to increase the page file a substantial amount and this huge system performance suck went away. The CPU still peaks up high, but the RAM doesn't get stuffed and crashes. I documented this and submitted this as a bug report back in the early T:ANE days, but was told everything was working as expected. If a normal operation crashes the system, then this isn't working as expected.
I rarely every get a CTD exiting or in Surveyor. When I have gotten it, I've tracked it down to a dodgy asset and ended up removing it. Using normal, what did I do last critical thinking, (If critical thinking is a normal thing these days) I tracked down the offending asset and removed it from the route and removed it from my content so I don't grab it again.
Like you I do periodic DBRs. I've noticed that this really does help with performance as well because this process reindexes the database and cleans up and compresses the internal tables. This doesn't reduce the overall size, but it does remove the extra empty places the content management routine has to dig through.