[Fortuna Bounty Objectives can be replaced with Asterisks]

I am encountering this as well, happens almost always on the excavation stages.

[Launcher Quickly Closes Itself]

Same here, launching from Steam as well. It's been like this for a couple of months now.

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In these instances it can take me loading the launcher 5+ times before I can play due to this.

Quick tip for working around this - the download actually continues in the background, so don't relaunch right away. You can tell when it's done by watching disk activity in Task Manager (sort by "Disk" and the download process should come up first). Relaunch when disk activity settles down and the process goes away, then your patch should be good to go. 

[Launcher Glitch]

Same here, have had this for a couple of months now. Good thing downloads still keep progressing in the background.