There's issues with newer versions of Java and Minecraft for a lot of people - this is the reason we're not updating to a newer one. The old launcher did not autodetect Java (unless you ran it from the .jar file), and I don't think this is a feature we would like to have in the new launcher either. As much as speed is useful, the most important thing for us is to try and make the game run as reliably as possible for as many people as possible.
There's two known crash issues right now, and I reckon it's one or both of them:
Latest regular geforce drivers crash Minecraft, I think. There's a hotfix released: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4378/?utm_content=buffer0ece9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Curse launcher doesn't support the new launcher. There's a fix released in their alpha builds: https://support.curse.com/hc/en-us/articles/215112106-Switch-Between-Live-and-Alpha
This is a known issue with the new launcher and Curse. We're looking into it.
This notice means that your version of the launcher won't be able to autoupdate, or that you're manually launching the jar instead of the exe. Consider getting the latest Minecraft installer and then launching the game from Minecraft.exe, and you hopefully shouldn't be seeing this.
I suspect this isn't an actual bug - we've had to push a lot of launcher updates recently to fix a number of issues we've seen. You've probably just been unlucky enough to start the launcher often and at the wrong times, so that you've gotten each update individually instead of all of them in one go.
Profiles should be sorted by most recently used, which we figured most users would prefer over alphabetically. Does that match what you're seeing?
There's two known crash issues right now, and I reckon it's one or both of them:
Latest regular geforce drivers crash Minecraft, I think. There's a hotfix released: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4378/?utm_content=buffer0ece9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Curse launcher doesn't support the new launcher. There's a fix released in their alpha builds: https://support.curse.com/hc/en-us/articles/215112106-Switch-Between-Live-and-Alpha