Game Design the Wrong Way

Located here.

The game designer is able to choose the size of each unit of play, allowing the designer to fix the size of the unit and adjust the unit’s difficulty by tweaking the individual challenges, or to fix the difficulty of each challenge and adjust the size of the unit to add new challenges and therefore manage the unit’s overall difficulty. These two strategies are complementary and may be employed in alternating fashion for the greatest control over each unit’s difficulty.

This pretty well aligns with my views on the subject.  Save points should be used to break up challenges into discrete chunks.

The problems arise when designers do not think of them in these terms.  An additional problem is the default use of “go back to the last save point” as the only failure condition.  That’s pretty much just laziness.