I recently noticed that Kstars 3.1.1 was released (saw it on the Stellarmate Facebook page, something I don't normally check out, but Google happened to point me there). I upgraded the software on my Intel Stick / Ubuntu 18.04 machine to the lastest Kstars/Ekos/Indi releases, and, voila -- the QHY driver no longer crashes on startup!

Thanks Jasem! I most likely won't have the chance to fully test for a couple days, but this is a big improvement.