I fully agree! I just wanted a harder playthrough. I finished Tactician with like 80,000 gold, 200 unused scrolls and potions and was a bit disappointed. However, I don't want a bug (falling to your death when the green landing circle clearly said the jump could be made) or a sudden brain fart deep into act 3 to make me start all over again. Why can't the people who want the extra challenge not have it exclusively combined with ironman mode? I don't want the golden dice or the Steam achievement. I just want to run the game again with better (translation: harder) economy, mobs, bosses and whatever cheese factors removed.
I think not having honor mode difficulty in custom settings is a mistake for those who don't care about the achievement but want to run the game in a harder setting. I would suspect it eliminates a good chunk of people.
And you still get all that you want in Honor mode . All your little complains about bugs are stupid a if you fall off a cliff your companions can rezz you and I have yet to see a bug that wipes the entire party .
Hell if you are so paranoid about it you can always just perma leave one person of your party in camp this way even if you wipe he can just talk to withers and have everybody rezzed.
There are other ways to get around it as well- the game still only auto saves at the same spots as before . Meaning if you are about to get slaughtered you can hard reboot your PC and then start from that save. It�s not like the game auto saves at every turn in combat. I almost wiped at the spider queen under blighted village and rebooted the laptop and the last save was from before I even entered the cave.
So unless you are a terrible player who needs constant save scumming and dozens of tries to beat a boss, it really isn�t that hard to beat Honor mode as it currently is