I think this is the most important point you brought up actually, but you've got it backards. Your issue wasn't with the lack of battery saves, it was that you didn't care for the standards of 8/16-bit era game design. Those games were shorter than more modern games, true, but that was exactly why being able to save your progress would have been bad game design. If able to save, the game would be over far too quickly, and you would have felt cheated out of your money. Being forced to replay the game over and over to get skilled enough to progress was part of the game design, not an oversight or lack of anything. It's true I don't have the patience for that kind of game anymore, but back then it wasn't a concern. Replaying a game over and over in the hopes of eventually making it to the end was how you got your money's worth.