When I ran my Raspberry PI years ago, I blew through a couple cheap SD cards. I had read about the Pi and the problems that people had with SD cards wearing out, so I decided to do the external hard drive solution. I had a USB to multi-format HDD reader (IDE, and SATA) and just pulled an old hard drive that I had laying around to use for the OS. Basically all you put on the SD is the boot partition that you then point to the external HDD for the rest of the OS. When my RasPi died and I migrated to an Orange PI PC, I pretty much did the same thing. Now I run my Vera Plus as my main HA controller and only have the Orange running my OWFS stuff that my Vera accesses.

@pndgt0 Always glad to help.

BRAVO, nice job.

Along the lines of what @gohan was saying about termination resistors, many of the modules that you buy these days have the termination resistors built in. The image below shows examples of two modules and their termination resistors.

If you have multiple devices on your RS485 bus, typically only your ending node on the bus should have the termination resistors. This image shows a typical RS485 master/slave bus with termination.

If slaves 1, 2 or 3 had termination resistors, there is the potential that the bus signal could get attenuated to the point of dropping off. Having only a few devices on the bus all with termination resistors may work. You may have drop offs though as you are seeing in your case. The more devices you put on your bus. the greater the chance of attenuation if the resistors are in place. You may want to try removing the termination resistors on your middle nodes if any and see if that fixes your problem. Take note of where these resistors are in place in the event that you may need to re-solder these to the module. On the two modules shown above you have 20K ohm (203) resistors that go from VCC to B and GND to A, and then there is a 120 ohm (121) resistor between A and B. You need to remove all 3 for the middle nodes.

My gateway is a serial gateway built with an easy newbie PCB and a pro mini.
What I did when I upgraded my 1.4 setup to 2.0, I pulled my pro mini that I had flashed with the 1.4 setup and put a new pro mini in that had 2.0. That way if there were any problems, I could easily swap the 1.4 pro mini back in to easily be back where I started.

Likewise when replacing your library, pull the MySensors folder out of your arduino libraries folder to keep as a backup until you know things will work. That way if you have to revert back, you can easily swap back the old MySensors folder. You have to completely remove it from the libraries folder though, you can't just rename it to something else.

@pndgt0 Take a look at this forum post:
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,1435.msg89456/topicseen.html#msg89456

You may need to clear the EEPROM. Your Arduino may have child ID 8 stored to where it is recalling it every time from EEPROM. To clear it, you can't use any old clear EEPROM sketch. You need to use the MySensors one posted at this link: https://www.mysensors.org/build/debug#clearing-eeprom
Try that and let us know. how it goes.

@Yveaux Bummer, I kind of like those.

@mfalkvidd Sorry, missed that.

Could you not also change what channel your radios ran on, at least for nRF24 radios, if a neighboring house ran on a certain channel? Wouldn't that give some separation between systems?