Kirk,
what do you mean with "not reliable". What is/was the problem? I'm using this function every day on my MacBook and on my PC and it works always very fine.
A question to all photographers reading here and using PM and Lightroom/PS: what is your workflow without cropping in PM? I make my image selection, do the image description (IPTC catpioning) and the cropping in PM. Then I import the images into LR for image adjustments (WB, exposure corrections etc.) and make an export to JPEG, finally. Then I go back to PM to transfer the exported images via FTP etc.
Until now the reason for cropping in PM is, that it is much faster than cropping in LR or PS. So how do you do it?
Lars