And once again, these issues seem restricted to you, so fucking shut up.
As for saving yourself? Why on earth would you ever rely 100% on auto save? Whenever I play games like Fallout or Elder scrolls, I am forever doing manual saves. Main reason being in case I make a shitty decision and need to back track. The same goes for FC3, RDR and GTA.
If you think its a hardship having to manual save, fuck knows how you would have survived in the days auto save didnt exist.