My experience has been that, with all other settings the same, debug mode seems to crash several times more often than normal mode. The increase in crashes during startup is particularly pronounced but crashes while loading saves and crashes during gameplay are more frequent too.
Friendly hint for future reference... Bug reports should always give logs, dumps or at least a specific set of environment details and replication steps. A report like this is not particularly helpful - where does the investigation begin? In the case of the startup crashes, for example: at what point does it die? Before the launcher loads? After clicking start game in the launcher? What mods were selected? If home brewed, is it known which XML stanza causes it? Which OS? Any messages displayed/logged to file or event log? And so forth. Detail narrows down the quantity of source that needs to be gone through. Same goes for crashes in autosave; eg. does it happen more often if a specific monster, buff, proc or action is involved? Just saying it's likelier in debug mode probably won't narrow it down enough. (My day job is in software dev. Issues there are more likely to get attention earlier if there's a clear place to start work. With Gaslamp's resources being what they are, I'd expect something similar.)
Here's three from trying to start the game tonight to start with. EDIT: Here's five more. After these I tried instead loading the game in normal mode and normal mode worked on the first try.
