Spine does not support holes in meshes. This simplifies a number of things and is rarely needed.
Using meshes to avoid drawing blank space saves you some fill rate. The trade off is that the more vertices you use, the more CPU you use. In both cases the differences are very small. While they can add up in an application that is doing a lot on suboptimal hardware, I would encourage you not to optimize aggressively before you actually have a performance problem because chances are you won't have a performance problem.
We would love to fix the crash. Can you reproduce the crash every time? If so, can you post or email a project file (images aren't needed) along with instructions on what steps to take to cause the crash? contact@esotericsoftware.com