Hi Grant,
Thanks for sharing this issue.
Looking at this particular framework and from what you've described, my expectation here is that the framework is taking responsibility for its own assembly loading, and as such would be fundamentally incompatible with NCrunch's optimisations.
It might be possible to force it to work with NCrunch by turning on the
pre-load assembly references setting, but I suspect that enabling the 'Copy referenced assemblies to workspace' setting may be your only real option here.
Unfortunately with NCrunch there is a balancing act between compatibility and performance. With toolsets like this, we need to be less performant and more compatible.