@cannibalbus,
You are correct that carloop is very small. It was designed to be very small.
However, I do not agree that carloop is unstable. Rather, carloop is a very powerful tool and needs to be treated as a powerful tool. It is capable of much greater functionality than an OBD-II diagnosis tool. With that greater functionality comes greater complexity and the user must take care to use it appropriately.
As far as I am aware, every carloop problem has been a user problem, or a case where the car uses a protocol other than CANbus and only one case where the carloop itself had an issue; that case was resolved by replacing the power regulator chip on the carloop. There could be something else that I am not aware of; I do not work for Carloop.
I have to make an assumption given the little information you have provided. Issues with white lights and red lights showing on the Photon leads me to assume that you have an issue with the setup of the Photon. Also, when you describe the lights, you MUST provide the color of the light AND the light pattern, in accordance with the link I provided you earlier. For example, for red lights it is critical to count the number of flashes in the pattern. Also, it is important to described exactly what you did to cause the red lights. If describing it is difficult, then maybe posting a video might be another way to communicate.
Please remove the Photon from the Carloop, and then attach the Photon to your computer using a USB cable.
Follow the instructions starting at the top of this page to put your Photon into listening mode and display the system firmware version.
https://docs.particle.io/support/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-tools/photon/#display-system-firmware-version
When you do this, please provide the actions and responses step-by-step so that we can help you out.