Diverse updates from ESH

I am running Designer on a Mac pro laptop (all updated), but the only version I can use is 0.7
all higher versions (0.8, and 0.9 snapshots) hang during load, posted it here:
https://community.openhab.org/t/designer0-8-for-mac-hangs-at-org-eclipse-xtext-ui-ecore/13619
Reverted back to 0.7 which works well for me.
Happy to provide more details if needed, but would need pointers what to post and where to find it.