Did anybody already enter an issue at Issues · openhab/openhab1-addons · GitHub about this?
Yes, through the introduction of Karaf things have indeed changed a lot (see also here). So testing should definitely be done on beta1.
Testing ZWave 1.8 and HABmin1 on openHAB 2 does not really bring much value though, since a ZWave 2.0 binding and HABmin2 is in the works and the final release of openHAB 2 will ship with them.
So since I am confident that the ZWave 1.8 binding will soon be fixed to work smoothly on beta1 as well, you are then of course free to use it - but we should not consume too much of @chris’ valuable time on this but rather let him finish the 2.0 version of the binding!