A game designed around a singular frustrating unoriginal feature such as this is just a badly designed game. Sorry.
Ok, we have different tastes, and that's ok, but Dark Souls 'badly designed game'?
What? Have you finished it? Do you know all about the game? Why are judging it so harshly? Just because of saves? Your comment is similar to someone from RPGCodex, who hates (almost) every RPG for fun...
I'm not saying, of course, that you MUST play it, if it doesn't interest you, well, fine by me
but please, remember this: we talk a lot about modern 'RPG' that have almost no consequences, that are ridiculously easy, every choice you make doesn't matter because there ISN'T any real choice to make, and when someone comes out with a game that's ALL about choices (few but important), then it's 'badly designed' because the auto save function makes your decision definitive for the rest of the playthrough... Bah.
If you want to save/load everywhere, there's plenty of games out there (and I play them as well), but this is different, and MUST be so. Why the hell would it be similar to every other game?