blowback, I feel your pain and really appreciate the detailed comment. Besides just thanking you, I think I have something helpful. I’ve created a new iso with latest anaconda bits from centos and it’s a lot less flaky. I tried a few paths especially with custom partitioning and no crash! I did manage to crash it trying to toggle on/off switch of a nic that’s not connected.
Anyway, I’d really like you to try the new iso/installer. It’s not on sourceforge yet as I want to do some more testing. You can get it from here: http://rockstor.com/Rockstor-3.8-0.iso
Could you please give it a try and perhaps report back some good news 
?
?