They are too stupid to know what's best for them.
It's not na bout people being too stupid, it's about what playing games is all about which is (usually) seeking advantage to defeat your foe against the odds. When you are presented with an opportunity to do that which ought not be there (or is unintentionally there) it is almost impossible to resist the temptation to use it. That is the nature of games and gamers.
In exactly the same way children, because of our evolutionary heritage, find it virtually impossible to resist sweets and chocolate bars and will eat as many as they can lay their hands on because they are programmed to (which is why sweets are banned from supermarket checkouts, and why I used that analogy.).
Let me give you a classic example of this:
Quill18 did an LP on Motorsport manager recently. It turns out that in this game if you have a fraction of a unit of fuel (defined as a lap's worth) left in your tank at pitstop it is rounded up to a full unit. So for example if you have 0.18 units left coming into the pits and you need 8 laps worth to finish the race you can put in seven and the game will round the 7.18 up to your required 8 for you. This saves you about 1s. It is a bug that can be used as an exploit.
Quill is by no means a stupid person. He wrested with this exploit issue for many episodes of his LP. He complained bitterly about the fact the game put him in this horrible dilemma situation. In the end he could not resist using this exploit - because it was there, because it gave him an edge. Even though it made him feel bad about it.
Or let's examine the big flaw in Dragon Age: Origins - the lyrium potion exploit.
The DA:O game economy is s7uch that there are a number of very choice items to buy at various shops but they are so expensive that you can only really hope to buy three of them over the course of a game, you cannot earn enough gold to buy more than that (and there are a lot more than that). You have to choose.......
.....except you don't. There is this one trader who sells the ingredients for lyrium potions so cheap that you can craft them and flog them to the wizards at a nice profit per potion thereby mint as many gold coins as you heart desires and buy ALL of the nice items in the shops. All of them.
Nobody knows whether Bioware put that exploit in deliberately or not, they've never said. But equally they've never "fixed" it. Should you use it? Definitely not, it's game breaking. Would you use it? Probably if you knew about it. It's extremely hard not to. But it breaks the game, the game was not balanced for your characters to have all that uber-gear, just two or three pieces. Use that exploit and your game is degraded.
So no, with respect I totally disagree with your position on this. Firaxis prevent save scumming individual shots in XCOM for a good reason. It is dead right that they do. It makes XCOM much better for most players. It's the right way to go.
