What could be causing several apps to have excessive wakeups?

The concept of excessive wakeups is just a checkpoint to start data collection for programs that cause a large energy usage.

It's not necessarily a bad thing if the program is expected to do significant work, but without this monitoring, system admins and Apple don't have actionable data to find misbehaving or misconfigured programs.

The wakeups may or may not be related to the crashing - so I would focus on identifying candidate programs and then see if the crashing itself is related to the code or the data.

Make a new user account and then when you log out of the affected user and in to the new user without any saved settings - you can launch the same program that was crashing.

If the program still crashes - you can conclude that the OS and/or specific build of that program have issues to investigate. If not, then you can conclude that the history of opened documents or the specific document is causing the program to abort or otherwise behave poorly.

So, I would gather a little more data in the following categories if I were to tackle a problem like yours:

1. What is the list of all programs on the watch list for a 24 hour period?
2. What count of errors for each?
3. For each program, is the error reproducible on a new user account?
4. For each program, is the error reproducible on the main account (launch three times, all three abort)?

You might find that there are different causes for different apps and need to be methodical to isolate and then use different approaches to remedy each instance. Or they might all trace back to a bad system that needs to be backed up and installed cleanly. Hard to tell in general without some effort to pin down the details.