That's right, go ahead and blame the game for you failing to play it.
Fact of the matter is that your arguments hold no water when literally thousands of people are doing just fine.
Maybe you might want to consider investing some more into the primary stat relating to the skills you want to use to increase their chance to work. Every rank in willpower or Bodybuilding gives about 10% resistance to its listed effects, if I remember right.
The game doesn't cheat if you're playing on normal, it just uses its normal balancing. Which in itself is supposed to be fairly harsh and force players to think a bit about how to tackle each and every encounter. Easy cheats in your favour while Hard cheats in the AIs favour.
Not that the game is without its faults, buuut... Blame the player, not the game...
I'll echo EinTroll here. The game has issues, but they're not the issues you're experiencing.
