That doesnt mean anything except it isnt balanced correctly or you played at too high difficulty/or fought the boss too early on. Lazy programmers doesnt care about balancing the game and instead make sure you're able to save anywhere. In case they didn't balance it correctly the player can still pass that boss/area by just abusing save/loading numerous times until luck strikes - a form of cheating.
Yep, exactly.
Without saving and reloading you actually have to find a good way to solve the situation. I am an console-hater, but I guess fixed save spots are one of the very few console-ish features which I like.
In Jagged Alliance 1 you also were not able to save in combat. In JA2 you were. You could basically "cheat" your way through each combat, by just save/load after each shot. Luckily they implemented also some kind of ironman mode lader where you could only save outside of combat. So now you are actually forced to do good decisions in combat. You can do this combat over and over to find the correct decisions, but it's a much bigger challenge and you will learn from it.
About the console games: Probably lots of the "old school" players are sick of current console influence in games. And as lots of the BIG projects like Wasteland and Project Eternity appeal to these players, they are designed like they were in the 90s and not like today where everything must be playable with a controller, crippling all the controls on the way. What you do see however are releases for IOS including Ipads and Linux, which is the result of unity. And a touch pad is much closer to classical mouse control than gamepads are.
On the other hand, Star Citizen goes with controllers but says that the hardware for consoles suck and this is their reason they don't want to be crippled by doing a multi platform game while implementing conrollers on the PC.
As I said before - I am a console hater and I appreciate that these projects don't compromise themselves, because then they would just be another game like Dragon Age 2 or XCover.
Edit: Oh and paying 40000$ for a patch will not make it more attractive for indie devs:
http://www.hookshotinc.com/interview-schafers-millions/
As far as I remember there was also one indie dev (can't remember the name, but it was mentioned in the quarter to three podcast) who didn't fix an easy-to-fix-bug causing broken savegames for his game, because he just didn't want to spend dozens of thousands dollars for the patch to be implemented.
Edit2: Here is the source:
http://www.destructoid.com/fez-patch-won-t-be-fixed-because-it-costs-too-much-231618.phtml
Polytron has announced that they won't be fixing the first Fez patch, and instead are re-releasing it as is despite the save file issue associated with it. The reason? Phil Fish states on the Polytron blog that it would cost "tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game." According the Giant Bomb, the exact cost for a patch is $40,000 based on a speech given by Phil at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona recently.