Tried hard, didn't read. You seem very upset about this, when probably the consensus in the room is that the save system has noble goals but also sharp flaws. As far as I can tell it's not like you were railing that the save system is the worst thing you've ever seen, either, so I don't know why you're engineering "i am righteous seer of light against the sheep" thing.
I don't think I'd ever choose to design highly restrictive save (or rest) systems, given how much annoyance they cause different players for all sorts of different reasons. But when a game does do it, I go along with it, and in the case of KCD I liked the way it encouraged me to play. It helped that I didn't experience that many bugs, and I don't really obsessively save/load anyway these days - I drunk like 20 schnapps total over 40+ hours without even trying to conserve.
D_X I think a lot of that comes down to how the difficulty plunges after the first 1/3 of the game as well. To really make food, rest, day/night and all of that meaningful, you need to achieve a really delicate balance where people get injured enough to need to go back to town regularly, money is scarce enough to make repairing a decision, etc., without making it so punishing or frustrating to totally stonewall the player. And that's really hard to do. my experience was that early game, when all of those systems are still novel and working OK, the save system
augments them and synergises; but as those systems start to fall apart once players get used to them and they become superknights with infinite money and 80 plate mails, all of these systems start to fall down (food becomes an annoyance because you're never really going hungry, etc).
