I've lost track at the amount of times this question has come up, in this mods comments.. in other mods comments, on the discords, in twitch streams.

YES. THE BETA HIGHLANDER CAN WORK AS A REPLACEMENT TO THE STABLE VERSION.

The BETA highlander has all the same functionality as the stable version. In fact at one point the stable version WAS in BETA itself, just as much as the BETA will become the next stable.

The CHL team have a strict backwards compatibility policy, all future highlanders are not to break functions of previous versions unless for bugfixing, or an agreed upon 'better' solution is found that also won't break mods reliant on the current function.

There is a point in the cycle where the stable and beta are one and the same mod!
The BETA is a 'snapshot' of the CHL github, just at a more advanced time than the stable. The reason it exists is for a wider feedback audience to the newest features introduced.

These newer BETA features have likely been part of the github project for some time, have been in use by the CHL devs for even longer, and in use by the author of the addition even longerer.

It's a 'hopefully stable' CHL - the BETA moniker to derive exactly that.
It exists because whilst the CHL dev are awesome, they can't possibly test new additions across the 5000+ mods on the workshop (and elsewhere), in the billions of configurations and PC setups out there in the world.

And they CARE about peoples games not suddenly imploding due to a CHL update. The two versions exist as a fallback safety loop.


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But you say that with the BETA you get 'missing dependencies' warnings in the Alternative Mod Launcher ..... well the devs of CHL and AML came together to work on that in the AML 1.4.1 release.
Sub to BOTH highlanders. Go into the AML settings and enable 'duplicate ID workaround' .... right click the BETA and choose it as 'preferred duplicate' - problem solved.
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Huzzah !!
~Hope this was a helpful post to someone