Is there any way for a user to determine the cause of a crash?  I have a minor background in a wide range of programming langues from ASM to higher level languages such as Python and JS.

A generic program in C/C++ can be debugged by GDB, or Valgrind.

Anything not at your control, is software-specific and I don't know about Tixati.
You might be able to find its logs and report to the devs, or looking at the options in Help->Diagnostics.