FYI for anyone who finds this thread:

I installed the shield on a Raspberry Pi 3 and used --my-leds-rx-pin=15 --my-rf24-ce-pin=12 config parameters. The network seems to work and the red LED is blinking. I have not verified whether the LED blinks when MySensors daemon receives a message, but I would assume it does and does not just blink randomly.

All in all this shield seems like quite a nice way to install the NRF24 radio to a Raspberry Pi, so I would highly recommend it over Dupont cables.

From your description it sounds like your problem is pretty much exactly same as mine was when I started that thread. I have not experienced any crashes. The issue is just that the board does not wake up on CHANGE. Have you tried using LOW instead of CHANGE for sleep? There were comments in the aforementioned thread that this might be an issue with a certain version of Arduino and boards file. Have not yet had time to investigate tough.