I save liberally as well, but manually saving in console games is enough of a pain that sometimes I don't want to do it, especially if the objective seems easy enough.
The part that angers me more than the fact that saving often is tedious at best is the fact that I was two-shotted by an enemy. I mean, seriously? I've run into numerous situations in Mass Effect where the enemy would hit me with an incapacitating attack the second I appeared, then a few goons would kill me. I wouldn't have the opportunity to do anything during the encounter, I'd just be immediately killed (and then I'd be subjected to thirty seconds of load times, not to mention the time wasted making up for lost ground).
It's a major annoyance that seriously hurts an otherwise good game.
