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There's a couple of sequences in AO with "breathing" room in them, mostly in the trials. But I'll grant you, it's more of a moment to collect your thoughts, as opposed to a quicksave area. Surely though, these sections in AE are basically just optional checkpoints?
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Well, all AE checkpoints are optional. Those don't seem more optional than that :D
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Can't really argue with that, though I'd say that there is a point where the player may feel like they're "cheesing" the game. It's rather like in Age of Empires 2, where the AI can be confused by certain strategies and is incapable of dealing with them, where a human player could easily work around it. Or like playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and just building nothing but motion simulators because they're the most cost-efficient ride.
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I can say breaking the game's rules may be very fun at times. I killed the Royal Griffin boss in Witcher 3 with a crossbow, that deals very little damage to him but has unlimited bolts and the bird can't really deal you any damage from the distance. It took 15 minutes of just spamming the button to completely drain its life, after which the guy in the cutscene tells me I should improve my vertical strikes, because they're too obvious. I didn't even draw my sword.
Still, it's a shame the developers didn't think of that.
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I'd say that I'm in a similar boat, but when I was a kid, I loved AO when I wasn't playing it, if that makes sense. Everything about AO appealed to me, except the actual act of trying to beat the game, because it felt like such a futile exercise. I don't think I finished Exoddus before it, but I definitely played for longer. AE I thought was funner to play, because it wasn't as hard. The quicksave was almost the only reason for that.
I don't know if the quicksave was the best way to solve the difficulty issues, but it was effective at making the game easier, that's for sure. Making the game easier was definitely a positive for me when I was first starting to play the game. If it hadn't been for Exoddus where I could make snail's pace progress as opposed to trying the same puzzle over and over and failing every time in Oddysee, I think I might not have remembered Oddworld the way I did.
Not to say I don't like the difficulty of Oddysee. In hindsight, especially, it was a big part of the game's atmosphere and overall feeling. Probably part of what drew me to it, knowing that it was hard and feeling some accomplishment when I made the least bit of progress. But whether or not it was best to introduce such an awesome world with such a seemingly sharp difficulty, I'm not sure.
I'm reminded of how I used to play Oddysee. It was a mix of me, my mother and my father all playing different parts. I did as much as I could myself, my mother took over when I wasn't sure what to do or had to memorize some kind of pattern and my father played exclusively to diffuse UXB mines, since he was the only one with that sense of timing. If I'd been playing alone, I would have lost patience after maybe three UXB bombs and a few complicated paramite puzzles. I suppose that's something else to thank my parents for.
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I understand that. I think we differ in what we expect from games. I actually like my games to be a good challenge, an fun obstacle that I can overcome if I try hard enough. I mean, besides just being a cool experience. In cases like AO, it's not enough.
EDIT: In my experience, AO's learning curve wasn't that unforgiving. The secret areas were tough as nails but they were optional. If you take them out, I don't remember any difficulty spikes in the "main game". RF was always quite easy, Stockyards required some reflexes to run jump from that one scrab at the beginning, but besides that it was mostly puzzles, the game went progressively harder later, but for me it felt like a natural pace.