Please help us by sending us the case you see 'Shirley' crashing so we can take a look. Either via your support contact or we can arrange for you to send it to me directly. It would also be good to know your machine specs.
I'd love to see your '2 days for us to intersect 30 million points with 1k drive time polygons' case as well. 2 days seems a little too long to me unless the machine it is being run on is pretty slow or doesn't have adequate resources.
Pro has had the ability to run most of the overlay tools in parallel for some time (set arcpy.env.parallelProcessingFactor = 100 before running the tool). If you have a machine that can handle it, you may be able to get more performance out of many overlay operations.
Thanks.